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Deepa Bhasthi translated Banu Mushtaq’s Kannada stories for Heart Lamp without smoothing away the languages and rhythms that make them feel rooted in their world. She called the approach “translating with an accent”: English that carries a deliberate Kannada hum. The book was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize when Sayari Debnath interviewed Bhasthi for Scroll in April 2025; it went on to win on May 20, becoming the first short-story collection and the first work translated from Kannada to receive the prize.
What Heart Lamp is—and what happened after the interview
Heart Lamp: Selected Stories is a collection of 12 stories by Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq, translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi. The stories were written between 1990 and 2023; Bhasthi selected and curated them for this collection rather than translating a novel or a pre-existing volume as a whole. The Booker Prize Foundation describes it as the first short-story collection to win the International Booker Prize and the first winning work translated from Kannada.
Scroll published its interview with Bhasthi on April 9, 2025, while the book was shortlisted. On May 20, 2025, the Booker Foundation announced that Heart Lamp had won. The change in status matters: the interview’s “shortlisted” description was accurate when published, but the book is now the 2025 winner. (Booker Prize Foundation, 2025; Scroll, April 9, 2025)
Mushtaq is a writer, lawyer and women’s rights activist based in Karnataka. Bhasthi is a writer and literary translator based in Kodagu, in southern India. The Booker Foundation reports that Bhasthi’s translation of Mushtaq’s stories received a PEN Presents award in 2024.
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What Bhasthi means by “translating with an accent”
Bhasthi’s aim was not to make the English sound as if the stories had been written in a culturally neutral voice. She retained Kannada, Urdu and Arabic words and phrases, along with some literal translations, so the language itself would signal that the stories came from a particular place and community. The challenge was to preserve that presence without turning cultural difference into spectacle.
In the Scroll interview, she explained: “I call it translating with an accent, which reminds the reader that they are reading a work set in another culture, without exoticising it, of course. So the English in Heart Lamp is an English with a very deliberate Kannada hum to it.” The phrase describes a craft choice: instead of treating standard English as an invisible default, Bhasthi lets the source language affect the texture and movement of the translation.
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That choice does not mean leaving every word unexplained or refusing English altogether. It means allowing some linguistic difference to remain audible in English, rather than replacing it with fluent phrasing that might conceal the original’s particularity. Booker judge and 2025 panel chair Max Porter described the result as “a radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes.”
How she chose and prepared the stories
Bhasthi’s selection began with reading Mushtaq’s fiction beyond the stories eventually included in the book. She chose pieces that interested her and that she felt could work in translation, while seeking variety across the collection. Mushtaq worked with her to settle the final selection.
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Bhasthi also described immersing herself in cultural material because she felt she knew too little about the community represented in the stories. She watched Pakistani television dramas, listened to music and took classes in Urdu script. These were part of her effort to approach the work with greater familiarity, not a claim that one community or language could be understood through a single set of references. The process was specific to this collection and to the questions she brought to it.
What the stories bring together
The Booker Foundation describes the stories as portraying women and girls in patriarchal communities in southern India. Their concerns include women’s lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression. Those themes give the collection political and social weight, but they are not the whole of its appeal: the judges also emphasized its characters, dialogue, humor, resilience, sisterhood and roots in oral storytelling.
Mushtaq has described the emotional impulse behind her writing this way: “The pain, suffering, and helpless lives of these women create a deep emotional response within me, compelling me to write.” Read alongside the judges’ attention to wit and storytelling, that statement suggests a collection attentive both to difficult circumstances and to the lives, voices and relationships that cannot be reduced to them.
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Scroll reported that And Other Stories published the UK edition, while Penguin Random House India published the book on the Indian subcontinent. The Booker Foundation also identifies And Other Stories as publisher of the winning book. These publisher details establish the reported publication geography; they do not, by themselves, establish a particular format, current stock or availability in another territory.
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The Booker Foundation estimates that Kannada is spoken by 65 million people, attributing the figure to Britannica. That is an attributed estimate, not a new calculation. The prize’s recognition brought an English translation of Kannada writing to a broad international literary audience, while Bhasthi’s approach made the presence of Kannada—and of other languages in the stories—part of how that audience encounters the book.
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