Indian activist author wins 2025 International Booker Prize for short story collection
Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq’s collection of short stories of women and discrimination, hailed as ‘something genuinely new for English readers’
Indian writer, lawyer and activist Banu Mushtaq has won the 2025 International Booker Prize for her short story collection Heart Lamp.
The 77-year-old is the first author of literature in Kannada, a language spoken predominantly in the southwest Indian state of Karnataka, to receive the prestigious literary award for translated fiction.
“This moment feels like a thousand fire flies lighting a single sky – brief, brilliant and utterly collective,” Mushtaq said at a ceremony at the Tate Modern gallery in London.
“I accept this great honour not as an individual but as a voice raised in chorus with so many others.”
Mushtaq will share the £50,000 (US$67,000) prize with her translator, Deepa Bhasthi, who also helped choose the stories.
Heart Lamp gathers 12 stories originally published between 1990 and 2023. They portray everyday life in Muslim communities of southern India, focusing on the experiences of women and girls.
Critics praised the collection for its dry and gentle humour, its witty, colloquial style and its searing commentary on patriarchy, casteism and religious conservatism.
Mushtaq, based in Karnataka, is known for her advocacy of women’s rights and her legal work confronting discrimination.
The jury hailed her characters – from spirited grandmothers to bumbling religious clerics – as “astonishing portraits of survival and resilience”.
“My stories are about women – how religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into mere subordinates,” she said.
Max Porter, chair of the judges, hailed Heart Lamp as “something genuinely new for English readers”.
“A radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes, it challenges and expands our understanding of translation.”
