​Stories from the heart: on Heart Lamp and the Booker Prize 2025

The marginalised have come to the fore with Banu Mushtaq winning the International Booker Prize for 2025. In a first for Kannada, Mushtaq and her translator Deepa Bhasthi walked away with the top honours on Tuesday night in London for Heart Lamp. This is also the first time in the history of the prize that a collection of short stories has won. Breaching walls, breaking ceilings, and enduring angry outbursts, Mushtaq chronicles the lives of Muslim women and their anxieties. Her stories are also peopled by clueless husbands, children who are like “monkeys without tails”, loving and, sometimes overbearing, grandmothers, muscular brothers and maulvis. But as Mushtaq has said in interviews, the narratives are primarily about women and how “religion, society, and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them”. She writes with candour and wry humour, even as the women are often struggling to stay afloat with their backs against the wall. In her moving acceptance speech, Mushtaq harped on the power of words to “create a world where every voice is heard, every story matters, and every person belongs”.

Showering praise on Kannada, she said that it is a language that sings of resilience and nuance — “to write in Kannada is to inherit a legacy of cosmic wonder and earthly wisdom”. The 77-year-old Mushtaq hails from Hassan in Karnataka, like another illustrious writer, Raja Rao, who wrote in Kannada, English and French. Mushtaq, a lawyer and activist, was inspired to write after hearing of the “pain, suffering, and helpless lives” of the women she interacted with. The “radical translation” by Bhasthi was praised by the Jury chair Max Porter who said it “ruffles language to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes”. Heart Lamp’s Booker, just three years after Geetanjali Shree won for Tomb of Sand, should open doors for India’s rich regional languages to gain a wider readership. Mushtaq follows a trail of writers such as Perumal Murugan, Vivek Shanbhag, Bama, Jayant Kaikini, M. Mukundan and S. Hareesh who observe the human condition in a socio-political context with their translators ensuring the rhythms of the original language are not lost. In a world that often tries to divide people, Mushtaq said that literature remains one of the “last sacred spaces where we can live inside each other’s minds if only for a few pages”. It is the only place that can embrace stories from unheard corners and translations that defy borders.