International Booker Prize 2025

Current Context : Banu Mushtaq’s Kannada short-story collection Heart Lamp, was announced as the winner of the International Booker Prize 2025 at a ceremony in London’s Tate Modern.

About

• What is it?
• The International Booker Prize is awarded annually for a work of fiction translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland. Heart Lamp is a collection of 12 stories originally written in Kannada.

About the Book

• Title: Heart Lamp
• Author: Banu Mushtaq
• Translator: Deepa Bhasthi
• Publisher: And Other Stories
• Language: Originally in Kannada
• Themes: Women’s rights, caste, faith, power, and oppression
• Content: A collection of 12 short stories written between 1990 and 2023, portraying the lives of women and girls in patriarchal communities in southern India.

• Significance : It is the first Kannada-language book and the first short-story collection to win the International Booker Prize, and Deepa Bhasthi is the first Indian translator to receive this award.