The winners of the 2025 International Booker Prize are breaking boundaries.
The winners of this year’s International Booker Prize were announced this Tuesday. Congratulations are in order to Banu Mushtaq, author of Heart Lamp, and Deepa Bhashti, who translated the winning collection.
This is the first time in International Booker history that a book of stories has received the top prize. It’s also the first time that a book translated from the Kannada has been recognized.
Heart Lamp was cited for its nuanced engagement with the lives of Muslim girls and women living in and around oppressive communities. The twelve pieces in the book were written over more than a dozen years. In a considered review of the collection for Himal, the writer Meghna Rao contextualized Mushtaq’s work in a richly rebellious literary tradition.
Her stories have been variously praised as frank, heart-wrenching, and emotionally intense. Which all chimes with the author’s credentials.
Mushtaq is an activist as well as a writer, and practiced law for many years. She told the Booker committee her stories are often inspired by personal interactions. Though as she notes in the collection’s epilogue, the book has a diasporic consciousness.
Mushtaq “does not see herself writing only about a certain kind of woman belonging to a certain community…The particulars may be different, but at the core is a resistance to being controlled, ‘tamed’, or disallowed the exploration of our full potential.”
The International Booker is a unique prize for being split. Half of the 50,000 pound award goes to a book’s author, and half to its translator. Bhashti, an international writer who’s previously translated books by Kodagina Gouramma and Kota Shivarama Karanth, describes her approach to translation as an “instinctive practice.”
The novelist Max Porter, chair of this year’s judging panel, announced the selection Tuesday evening, from a shortlist of six other titles.
Glasses were raised at the Tate Modern.
