Banu Mushtaq, a Kannada author and activist, has won the 2025 International Booker Prize for the English translation of her short story collection Heart Lamp. The award recognizes her decades-long body of work addressing patriarchy, prejudice, and resistance in southern India. As the second Indian winner and the first for a short story collection, the prize highlights translated fiction's global reach.
Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, features 12 stories written between 1990 and 2023. These narratives chronicle the lives of women and girls in patriarchal communities in southern India, emphasizing resistance against injustice. Mushtaq, who came of age during Karnataka's Bandaya literary movement in the 1970s and 1980s, draws from that era's blend of literature and activism, where writers joined farmers, Dalits, and women's groups in protests.
The author views writing as a form of confrontation with power and prejudice. 'It is a troubled time we’re living in,' she said, pointing to rising hate speech and the demonisation of the Muslim community. On the role of writers in crises, she added, 'At this fractured time, if you don’t talk, if you don’t shout, if you don’t echo the words and cries of our fellow beings, it is an unpardonable thing.' At the heart of her work is the belief that 'Personal is political,' with ordinary acts gaining political weight through context. Her characters' resistance, she notes, 'itself is politicalised.'
As a Muslim woman writing in Kannada rather than Urdu, Mushtaq faced suspicion and questions about her legitimacy. 'Muslim? Muslims are demonised. Woman? A woman is condemned, cornered,' she reflected. Assumptions limited women writers to domestic topics, and she encountered boundaries from religious and systemic sources. 'I have got two swords, one in each hand; I am fighting with the patriarchy, and with the right-wing people,' she said. This pressure leads to self-censorship: 'I cannot write a full sentence without self-censoring.'
Max Porter, chair of the 2025 jury, praised the book for offering 'something genuinely new' to English readers. 'This was the book the judges really loved, right from our first reading,' he stated. Mushtaq, also a lawyer and anti-caste activist, follows Geetanjali Shree as the second Indian International Booker winner. In her acceptance speech, she described the moment as 'a thousand fireflies lighting up a single sky—brief, brilliant and utterly collective.' The judges called her stories 'life-affirming,' focusing on themes of reproductive rights, faith, caste, power, and oppression. Mushtaq's female characters, often poor or illiterate, fight back in their own ways—compromising, striking, or laughing ironically.
