In a night of many firsts, Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp (And Other Stories), translated from the Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, won the 2025 International Booker Prize.
Announced the night of May 20 in a ceremony at London’s Tate Modern, it was the first time the award was given to a short story collection or any work translated from Kannada, a major Indian language. It was also the first time an Indian translator received the honor, which is widely regarded as the most influential for translated fiction and includes a cash prize of £50,000, split evenly between author and translator.
Written by Mushtaq between 1990 and 2023 and compiled by Bhasthi into the English collection, Heart Lamp’s 12 stories center on the lives of everyday women in patriarchal communities in southern India. Mushtaq’s protagonists are based on real women she has encountered in her work as a lawyer and women's rights advocate.
In its review, PW highlighted the wide tonal and thematic range of Mushtaq’s stories, which include “a wryly humorous tale of three children trying to comfort their rapidly declining great-aunt" and a harrowing story of “a mother who resolves to self-immolate after her family refuses to support her choice to leave her unfaithful husband.”
And Other Stories, a U.K.-based indie publisher and first-time Booker recipient, was approached by Bhasthi’s agent Kanishka Gupta to acquire Heart Lamp after the collection won English PEN’s grant for sample translations, PEN Presents. Once published, the book went on to win the English PEN Translates Award in 2024.
Stefan Tobler, publisher of And Other Stories, noted the practical significance of winning the International Booker Prize. “A major prize success is something you do hope comes along every few years...to do that thing that happens in publishing, where the one book will also help you carry on and do the other books,” Tobler told PW.
The International Booker Prize is known to boost sales for the winning book. According to the Booker Prize Foundation, sales of the 2024 winner Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (New Directions), translated by Michael Hofmann, increased by 442% in the week after award was announced and rose to 80,000 copies in the past year, and the number of territories purchasing translation rights more than doubled. Tobler said that And Other Stories, which holds English and most other translation rights, had already been approached with numerous offers the day after the announcement.
Alongside the U.S. and U.K editions, both published by And Other Stories, sales of the Indian market English-language edition of Heart Lamp, published by Penguin Random House India, can also be expected to increase, and Indian translation rights, which are held by Bhasthi's agent, have already been sold for seven additional Indian languages.
