A landmark win reshapes a global prize
Here’s a milestone no one had penciled in: a Kannada author winning the International Booker Prize—and doing it with a short story collection. Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp: Selected Stories, translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi, has taken the 2025 award, rewriting the record books on two counts at once. It’s the first time a work in Kannada has taken the prize, and the first time a collection of short fiction has outpaced novels at the finish line.
Heart Lamp gathers twelve stories written between 1990 and 2023, distilling more than three decades of work into a single volume. The book, published in the UK by independent press And Other Stories on September 10, 2024, focuses on the lives of Muslim girls and women in southern India. The judges praised the collection’s emotional force and moral clarity, saying it brings into sharp focus people who often live at the edges of public life.
Mushtaq is not just a writer. She’s also worked as a journalist, a lawyer, and a women’s rights advocate. That mix shows on the page: the stories confront power—be it in the home, the workplace, the courts, or the street—without losing sight of day-to-day tenderness, humor, or the pull of faith. The title story’s raw heart comes from a real episode in Mushtaq’s own life, when the protagonist’s moment of despair is interrupted—and softened—by her children’s presence. The scene lands with a quiet punch and lingers.
The judges highlighted how the collection cuts through the fault lines of caste, class, and religion that run through contemporary life, pointing to the rot—corruption, violence, injustice—that festers in the cracks. Their remarks echoed a broader sentiment readers often share after finishing these stories: the writing is direct and deceptively simple, but the afterglow is heavy. The characters don’t make a fuss; they move you anyway.
This win also underlines something the prize has increasingly stood for: the central role of translation in widening the world’s reading map. The International Booker recognizes a single work of fiction translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland, and the cash award is shared equally between the author and the translator. That split is symbolic—it says the book we’re reading in English is co-authored by the person who rebuilt its voice word by word. On stage, both Mushtaq and Bhasthi spoke about that partnership, and the announcement—made by writer Max Porter—framed the book as a breakthrough for stories that resist easy packaging.
For Kannada literature, this is a loud moment. The language has a deep, modern literary tradition, but it rarely gets top billing in global conversations dominated by English and a handful of European tongues. A win like this jolts the ecosystem: it nudges publishers to scout more Kannada work, gives translators leverage, and sends readers hunting for titles they’ve never seen shelved at eye level.
Stories that burn bright: themes, translation, and ripple effects
Heart Lamp spans a long arc of writing and a wide social canvas. The voices within are distinct—sometimes furious, sometimes weary, sometimes sly—but they carry a shared impatience with how patriarchy and class power police women’s lives. The stories ask: How much room does a woman have to breathe, love, and make choices when family honor, community expectations, and state authority all press in at once?
The collection includes:
- Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal
- Fire Rain
- Black Cobras
- A Decision of the Heart
- Red Lungi
- Heart Lamp
- High-Heeled Shoe
- Soft Whispers
- A Taste of Heaven
- The Shroud
- The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri
- Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord
Several pieces are set in homes where kindness and cruelty sit at the same table. Others play out in schools, hospitals, government offices, or dingy back rooms where rules are made off the record. Everyday objects—shoes, food, a cloth shroud—become portals to memory and markers of control. Dialogue carries much of the tension, and there’s often a pivot midway where a character’s world tilts by a few unfixable degrees.
Mushtaq writes inside the orbit of Bandaya Sahitya, a post-1970s Kannada movement whose name—Bandaya—speaks of revolt and resistance. This tradition pushed literature to talk back to power: to caste hierarchies, to gender violence, to class exploitation, to sectarian policing. You feel that legacy here, not as sloganeering but as a habit of looking straight at what polite society looks away from. The stories are not pamphlets; they’re densely human, built to be read and reread.
Language is part of the politics. Bhasthi keeps Kannada, Urdu, and Arabic words where they carry weight, letting context do the heavy lifting rather than flattening everything into tidy English. That choice preserves rhythm, registers social distance, and signals who belongs to which world. Readers meet a living city of tongues—code-switching mothers, teachers who discipline in one language and console in another, bureaucrats who switch to officious English at just the right moment to shut a conversation down.
Translating this kind of multilingual fiction is a balancing act: how much to gloss, how much to trust the reader, how to carry humor across without building explanatory scaffolding that kills it. Bhasthi’s version has been praised for getting that balance right—open enough for new readers, stubborn enough to keep the book’s core textures intact. That care has helped the stories travel well beyond the prize circuit. One standout, Red Lungi, has already appeared in the Paris Review, and Bhasthi’s craft essay, Anthe: On Translating Kannada, ran in the same magazine, giving readers a window into the translator’s toolkit.
The attention isn’t just about subject matter, but also about craft. The judges pointed to “solid storytelling” and “unforgettable characters.” That’s not just polite praise. These stories are tightly made. Scenes start with calm surfaces—children playing on a veranda, a street vendor hawking snacks, the metallic heat of a bus stand—and then the temperature rises. A small decision reveals a bigger wound. A matter-of-fact errand becomes a negotiation with power. The surprises feel earned because they grow from the characters’ limits and desires, not from plot tricks.
Heart Lamp also engages with faith without caricature. Mosques, rituals, and prayers appear as they do in life: as comfort, as pressure, as habit, as hope. The stories hold multiple truths at once—religion as a social anchor, and as a language sometimes used to police women’s bodies and choices. That layered approach is part of why the voices feel lived-in rather than framed as case studies.
For readers new to Kannada literature, this book is an accessible start and a deep dive in one. You don’t need footnotes to feel the pull. But if you’ve grown up with Kannada writing—or with neighboring traditions in Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Konkani, or Urdu—you’ll hear echoes: the cadences of family speech, the bluntness of local bureaucracy, the off-hand cruelty that hides in “adjust, adjust,” that famous Indian phrase for bear it and move on.
The recognition has been building. Before the prize announcement, the Washington Post flagged Heart Lamp as a finalist, framing the collaboration between Mushtaq and Bhasthi as a powerful bridge for stories about Muslim women in southern India. In the UK, independent bookstores championed the title as a book-club pick that holds both narrative drive and social bite. Add the ceremony’s spotlight—Max Porter reading out the winner, speeches from author and translator—and you get a moment that crystallizes years of quiet work.
What changes now? For one, regional Indian literatures—written in dozens of languages—enter global conversations through translation at a faster clip when a win like this happens. Publishers take more chances. Grants for translators loosen up. University syllabi expand. Festivals invite panels that aren’t just “diversity” sidebars but main-stage conversations about form, voice, and how translation shapes the future of English-language reading.
It also matters who is at the center of these stories. Books about Muslim women in South Asia often arrive mediated through external gazes—policy debates, headlines, or trauma reporting. Heart Lamp flips the frame. The women are not symbols. They are particular people with specific jokes, petty grudges, work routines, and bad days. That specificity is political. It pushes back against the urge to read their lives as illustrations rather than as literature.
The mechanics of the prize reinforce that point. By splitting the award between author and translator, the International Booker has steadily elevated translators as artists. Readers are more likely now to follow translators the way they follow authors, and to see that each translation is a set of creative decisions. That shift helps sustain a pipeline where languages like Kannada—rich, contemporary, and under-translated—can travel more than once a decade.
There’s also a publishing backstory worth noting. And Other Stories, the UK press behind Heart Lamp, has built a reputation for adventurous lists—books that earn their readers one by one, and then break out through word of mouth. Indie presses are often the risk-takers who pick up books like this before the big houses catch on. When the bet pays off, it changes what gets greenlit next season.
As for Mushtaq, this win threads through her many roles. The journalist’s eye for detail, the lawyer’s attention to power, the activist’s patience for hard truths—these aren’t themes; they’re tools that shape how the stories move. She writes women who know the cost of telling the truth and who count the compromises as they make them. Men in the stories are rarely monsters; they’re ordinary people performing the scripts they’ve inherited, which makes their harm—and their tenderness—feel all the more real.
Readers coming to the book for the first time may want to pace themselves. The stories carry weight, and the satisfactions are cumulative. You finish one, sit with it, notice a line echoing an earlier story, and only then move to the next. This is part of the book’s design. It doesn’t ask you to binge; it asks you to linger. The pay-off is that, by the end, the world of the collection feels mapped not just by plot but by voice and memory.
If there’s a single reason this win feels historic beyond the record-keeping, it’s this: the book proves that powerfully local stories—rooted in one language, one region, one community’s daily life—can speak across borders without sanding down their edges. That’s what translation, at its best, makes possible. And it’s why Heart Lamp will likely keep traveling, from book clubs to classrooms to conversations far from the places where its characters live, argue, and make do.