Source : NEW INDIAN EXPRESS NEWS
Writer, activist, and lawyer Banu Mushtaq has won the prestigious International Booker Prize 2025 for her short story collection Heart Lamp, the first-ever Kannada work to receive the award. The prize, worth GBP 50,000, was awarded during a ceremony at the Tate Modern in London, with Mushtaq sharing the stage, and the prize money with Deepa Bhasthi, who translated the book into English.
Celebrated for its “witty, vivid, colloquial, moving, and excoriating” portraits of women navigating patriarchal communities in southern India, Heart Lamp stood out among six shortlisted titles from around the world. The collection, twelve short stories written over three decades from 1990 to 2023, vividly captures the resilience, resistance, wit, and sisterhood of everyday women, deeply rooted in Karnataka’s rich oral storytelling traditions.
Chair of the 2025 judging panel, Max Porter, described the book as “a radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes,” praising it as something “genuinely new for English readers.”
Mushtaq, sees the win as a victory for diversity and the power of storytelling, “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,” she said during her acceptance speech. “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.”
Deepa Bhasthi, whose translation was lauded for preserving the musicality and multilingual fabric of Karnataka’s everyday speech, called the win “a beautiful win for my beautiful language.” By retaining Kannada, Urdu, and Arabic words in the English version, she sought to maintain the book’s polyphonic spirit “None of us speaks ‘proper English’ in Karnataka,” Bhasthi remarked at a recent book event in Bengaluru’s Champaca Bookstore.
“We exist within multiple languages and dialects. I was translating for Indian readers — I wanted them to hear the deliberate Kannada hum behind it.”
SOURCE :- NEW INDIAN EXPRESS
