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Banu Mushtaq’s “Heart Lamp,” translated by Deepa Bhasthi, had received little notice in Britain or the United States before Tuesday. Now, it’s won the major award for translated fiction.
Reporting from the International Booker Prize ceremony in London
May 20, 2025, 5:13 p.m. ET
A collection of stories about Indian Muslim women’s daily struggles with bothersome husbands, mothers and religious leaders, on Tuesday won this year’s International Booker Prize, the major award for fiction translated into English.
Banu Mushtaq’s “Heart Lamp,” translated from the original Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, is the first story collection to win the prestigious award. The prize comes with 50,000 pounds, or about $66,700, which the author and translator will split equally.
Established in 2005, the International Booker Prize was originally awarded to an author for their entire body of work and Alice Munro, the short-story writer, was an early recipient. But since 2016, it has been given to a single book translated into English and published in Britain or Ireland during the previous 12 months and no collection had won until Tuesday.
Max Porter, an author and the chair of this year’s judges, said in a news conference that “Heart Lamp” contained “extraordinary accounts of patriarchal systems and resistance,” while the way Bhasthi had translated the collection was unique.
Most translations aim to be “invisible” so that readers wouldn’t know the book wasn’t originally written in English, Porter said. But, he added, Bhasthi’s translation was the opposite, and “Heart Lamp” was filled with Indian expressions and ways of talking that gave its 12 stories “an extraordinary vibrancy.”
“A lot of English readers will find it unlike anything they’ve ever read before,” Porter said.
“Heart Lamp” beat five other shortlisted titles, including Solvej Balle’s “On the Calculation of Volume: 1,” translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, about an antiquarian bookseller who relives the same day over and over, and Vincenzo Latronico’s “Perfection,” translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes, which follows an expatriate couple in hip Berlin.
