Toronto/ CMEDIA: Heart Lamp reportedly became the first short-story collection to win the 2025 International Booker Prize.
“Heart Lamp is something genuinely new for English readers. A radical translation…from Kannada, interspersed with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects…of women’s lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression… to the evolving appreciation of these stories from the different perspectives,” Max Porter, International Booker Prize 2025 judge (Chair) has said.
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, originally published in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023 is a collection of 12 short stories chronicling the everyday lives of women and girls in patriarchal communities in southern India championing women’s rights and protesting all forms of caste and religious oppression.
The author of collections of six short-stories, a novel, an essay and a poetry collection, Banu Mushtaq writes in Kannada and has won major awards for her literary works, including the Karnataka Sahitya Academy and the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe awards.
Mushtaq’s writing is at once witty, vivid, moving in which she emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature. As a writer, women’s rights activist and lawyer in the state of Karnataka, southern India, Banu Mushtaq began writing within the progressive protest literary circles in southwestern India in the 1970s and 1980s.
Heart Lamp is the first book-length translation of Mushtaq’s work into English. She becomes the second Indian writer to win the International Booker Prize, while Heart Lamp is the first winner to be translated from Kannada, a major language spoken by an estimated 65 million people.
‘My stories are about women – how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them…daily incidents reported in the media and the personal experiences I have endured…pain, suffering, and helpless lives of these women…I do not engage in extensive research; my heart itself is my field of study, Banu Mushtaq reportedly said.
Deepa Bhasthi’s translation of Banu Mushtaq’s stories was a winner of English PEN’s ‘PEN Translates’ award. She has called her process for Heart Lamp, ‘translating with an accent’, and she becomes the first Indian translator to win the International Booker Prize.
‘For me, translation is an instinctive practice, and each book demands a completely different process. With Banu’s stories, I first read all the fiction she had published before I narrowed it down to the ones that are in Heart Lamp. I was lucky to have a free hand in choosing what stories I wanted to work with, and Banu did not interfere with the organised chaotic way I went about it,’ Deepa Bhasthi said.
Deepa Bhasthi is a writer and literary translator based in Kodagu, southern India. Her columns, essays and cultural criticism have been published in India and internationally. Her published translations from Kannada include a novel by Kota Shivarama Karanth and a collection of short stories by Kodagina Gouramma.
