Banu Mushtaq becomes second Indian writer to win International Booker Prize

London: Writer, activist and lawyer Banu Mushtaq made history on Tuesday night as her short story collection 'Heart Lamp' became the first Kannada-language work to win the prestigious £50,000 International Booker Prize.

In 2022, Hindi writer Geetanjali Shree won the International Booker Prize for her novel Ret Samadhi (2018), translated into English as Tomb of Sand by Daisy Rockwell. 

Mushtaq accepted the award at a ceremony held at London’s Tate Modern, alongside translator Deepa Bhasthi, who rendered the collection from Kannada into English.

Hailed by the judging panel for its “witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating” depiction of family and community tensions, 'Heart Lamp' was selected from a shortlist of six titles from around the world.

Calling the win a “victory for diversity,” Mushtaq underscored the significance of regional voices gaining global recognition.

"This book was born from the belief that no story is ever small, that in the tapestry of human experience every thread holds the weight of the whole," said Mushtaq.

"In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the lost sacred spaces where we can live inside each other's minds, if only for a few pages," she said.

Translator Bhashti added: "What a beautiful win this is for my beautiful language."

The annual prize celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between May 2024 and April 2025. The other five books on the shortlisted included: On the Calculation of Volume I' by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland; Small Boat' by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson; Under the Eye of the Big Bird' by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda; Perfection' by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes; and A Leopard-Skin Hat' by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson.

Max Porter, International Booker Prize 2025 Chair of judges, said: This list is our celebration of fiction in translation as a vehicle for pressing and surprising conversations about humanity. These mind-expanding books ask what might be in store for us, or how we might mourn, worship or survive. They offer knotty, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes radically hopeful answers to these questions.

"Taken together they build a miraculous lens through which to view human experience, both the truly disturbing and the achingly beautiful. They are each highly specific windows onto a world, but they are all gorgeously universal."

Each shortlisted title is awarded a prize of GBP 5,000 shared between author and translator and the winning prize money is split between Mushtaq and Bhashti, who receive GBP 25,000 each.

In 2022, Geetanjali Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell won the coveted prize for the first-ever Hindi novel Tomb of Sand', with Perumal Murugan's Tamil novel Pyre', translated into English by Aniruddhan Vasudevan making it to the longlist in 2023.