Indian creator Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi win the International Booker 2025 Prize for fiction on Tuesday for “Heart Lamp,” a group of 12 short stories written over a duration of more than 30 years and which chronicle the lives and struggles of women in southern India.
The award was announced by bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted writer Max Porter in his role as chair of the 5-member balloting panel, at a ceremony at London’s Tate Modern.
Banu Mushtaq as International Booker 2025 Winner
It is the first time the award has been given to a fiction of short memories. Bhasthi is the first Indian translator, and the 9th women translator, who win the prize because it took on its cutting-edge shape in 2016. Mushtaq is the 6th women writer to be awarded the prize considering then.
Written in Kannada, which is spoken by around 65 million people, generally in southern India, Porter praised the “radical” nature of the interpretation, including that “It’s been a pleasure” to pay attention to the evolving appreciation of the testimonies by people of the jury.
“These lovely, busy, life-declaring memories rise from Kannada, interspersed with the incredible socio-political richness of different languages and dialects,” stated Porter. ”It speaks of women’s lives, rights, faith, caste, strength and oppression.”
About “Heart Lamp” Fiction
The e-book, which beat five different finalists, incorporates stories written from 1990 to 2023. They were selected and curated by Bhasthi, who was keen to maintain the multilingual nature of southern India in her translation.
International Booker 2025 Winner, Mushtaq who is attorney and activist and writer, advised a short-list reading event on Sunday that the stories “are around women, how faith, society and politics call for unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inpeoplee cruelty upon them, turning them into mere subordinates.”
Read also: Supreme Court Mandates three-year practice as lawyer to enter judicial service