Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, won the 2025 International Booker Prize. The win set several specific, prize-level firsts: the first short-story collection to win, the first winner translated from Kannada, the second Indian author to win, and the first Indian translator to win. Those milestones are real and documented. They do not, on their own, show that publishing or translation barriers have been removed, and the rest of this article explains the difference.
What the win recorded
The International Booker Prize recognizes a single work of fiction translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. For the 2025 prize, eligible books had to be published in the window from 1 May 2024 to 30 April 2025. The prize is awarded to the author and the translator jointly, and its £50,000 is divided equally between them.
The table below lists the milestones the prize’s own announcement records, with the scope each one carries.
| Milestone | Who it applies to | Scope of the claim |
|---|---|---|
| First short-story collection to win | Heart Lamp | A statement about the International Booker’s history, not about short fiction in English generally. |
| First winning book translated from Kannada | Heart Lamp | Prize-specific. It does not mean Kannada literature had never been recognized internationally before. |
| Second Indian author to win | Banu Mushtaq | Counts winners of this prize only. |
| First Indian translator to win | Deepa Bhasthi | Counts winners of this prize only. It is not a claim about literary translation history. |
Each of these is a fact about the prize’s record. Read together, they describe a visible change in one major award rather than a change across the whole English-language publishing system.
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The author: Banu Mushtaq
Mushtaq is a writer, lawyer, and women’s rights activist from Karnataka. According to the Booker, she began writing in the 1970s and 1980s within progressive protest literary circles in southwestern India. The prize connects her to Bandaya Sahitya, a movement that gave rise to influential Dalit and Muslim writers.
She has said that women’s experiences, including those of people who came to her seeking help, inspired the stories. In her own words:
“My stories are about women – how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into mere subordinates.”
That is her stated motivation. It is not a claim that one collection speaks for every woman or community in the region.
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The translator: Deepa Bhasthi
Bhasthi is a writer and literary translator based in southern India. Heart Lamp is described by the Booker as Mushtaq’s first book-length translation into English. Bhasthi selected and curated the stories as well as translating them, which is why the prize treats her as a full co-winner rather than a supporting contributor.
She describes her approach as “translating with an accent.” The practical effect is visible on the page, as the next section explains.
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What the twelve stories cover
The collection brings together 12 stories written between 1990 and 2023, a span of more than three decades. They portray women and girls in patriarchal communities in southern India, and the stories hold wit, resilience, resistance, and sisterhood alongside inequity and hardship.
The Booker’s own summary lists themes including women’s lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power, and oppression. Those are the prize’s descriptions of the book, and they are the most reliable guide to its content available from the prize’s own materials.
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The stories move between Kannada and other languages of southern India, and characters sometimes use Urdu or Arabic words. Bhasthi keeps those words in their original form. The Booker’s reading guide notes three choices that shape the reading experience:
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- Specific cultural terms are retained rather than replaced with English equivalents.
- There are no footnotes to explain them.
- Kannada, Urdu, and Arabic words are not italicized, so they do not look marked as foreign on the page.
Bhasthi explains the reasoning in the reading guide: “By not italicising them, I hope the reader can come to these words without interference, and in the process of reading with the flow, perhaps even learn a new word or two in another language” (p. 214). The result is English that carries the texture of multilingual speech, which is what the judges singled out.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the judges said
Max Porter, chair of the 2025 judging panel, said:
“Heart Lamp is something genuinely new for English readers. A radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes. It challenges and expands our understanding of translation.”
Porter also said the book speaks of “women’s lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression.” These are the views of the chair of the judges. They are an informed assessment of the book, not a consensus among all readers or critics.
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Kannada and the size of its readership
The Booker’s announcement estimates that there are about 65 million Kannada speakers, including 38 million first-language speakers. That figure is attributed to the prize’s report, which links to Britannica for its underlying estimate. The announcement does not give the publication year of that estimate, so treat it as an approximate figure rather than a current census count.
What “breaks barriers” can accurately mean
The phrase is accurate when it refers to the specific milestones in the prize’s history. It becomes inaccurate when it implies a measured change in publishing as a whole. The sources available do not establish the following:
- Submissions: No data was found showing whether translated submissions from Kannada or other Indian languages have increased since the win.
- Publication and funding: No figures show changes in translation funding, publishing deals, or the number of Kannada books reaching English readers.
- Sales and access: No independently verified sales or readership figures link the win to changes in access.
- Completed change: Representation in the prize is an acknowledged concern, but no evidence shows that the barriers have been resolved.
The prize’s own announcement acknowledges the problem it is trying to address. Its PEN Presents partnership with English PEN was created to address underrepresentation of translators from the Global Majority among submissions to the prize. The partnership shows that the concern is recognized inside the prize. It does not measure the program’s effect, and nothing here shows that all barriers have been removed.
A prize win is a symbolic and professional milestone. It can increase visibility for a book, a translator, and a language. Whether it changes who gets published or translated is a separate question that requires different evidence.
Where to start reading
The English-language book is Heart Lamp: Selected Stories by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. Check the publisher’s current edition and availability before you buy, because the sources reviewed for this article did not verify retail listings or prices. The Booker’s reading guide also points readers to Tomb of Sand and Pyre as further reading.
Reading the stories with the translator’s choices in mind is worthwhile. Note where an untranslated word changes the sentence’s rhythm, and where a reader can work out meaning from context.
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