Heart Lamp, written by author, women’s rights activist and lawyer Banu Mushtaq and translated by Deepa Bhasthi, has won the International Booker Prize 2025. The writer and translator will share the £50,000 prize as well as the £2,500 awarded to each of the six shortlisted authors.
Heart Lamp is a collection of 12 short stories, originally published in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, that explores the everyday lives of women and girls in patriarchal communities in southern India. ‘Heart Lamp is something genuinely new for English readers. A radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes’, said Max Porter, chair of the Prize judges.
Inaugurated in 2005, the annual International Booker Prize awards ‘the best international writers and translators of fiction’ for books translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland.
