# Heart Lamp wins the 2025 International Booker Prize in a first for a short story collection

Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi won the 2025 International Booker Prize on 2025-05-20 for *Heart Lamp*, making history as the first short story collection ever to receive the award. The result also marked a milestone for translation: Bhasthi became the first Indian translator to win the prize.

The winning book is built from 12 stories originally written in Kannada, the official language of Karnataka in southern India. According to the judging panel, the collection offered English readers something new rather than a straightforward transfer from one language to another. Chair of judges Max Porter described the work as a “radical translation” and emphasized both its literary texture and its political seriousness. The panel highlighted the book’s focus on the lives of women in patriarchal communities in southern India, but also stressed that the stories are not only polemical or programmatic. They are, in Porter's words, “beautiful accounts of everyday life” with feminism embedded in the narrative fabric.

The prize was shared equally between writer and translator and carried a £50,000 award. It was presented at Tate Modern in London on Tuesday evening, where actor Ambika Mod read from the winning title. The Guardian’s coverage also noted that the judges deliberated for six hours before reaching a unanimous decision, with the panel split across literary and artistic backgrounds but aligned on the final choice.

Mushtaq’s reaction framed the award as more than a personal achievement. She said the win affirmed the value of diversity and difference, and argued that literature remains one of the few places where readers can inhabit one another’s minds. That response matched the broad reception to the book on the shortlist, where the collection had already been singled out as a likely winner because of the strength of its voice and the consistency of its vision.

The judging statement suggested that *Heart Lamp* stood out not only because of what it says, but because of how it says it. Porter praised Bhasthi’s translation for celebrating movement between languages and for retaining a multiplicity of Englishes. Bhasthi herself has described her method as “translating with an accent,” a phrase that captures the balance she aims for between accessibility and cultural specificity. In the piece cited by The Guardian, she said the English in *Heart Lamp* carries a deliberate Kannada hum rather than smoothing the original into a neutral literary standard.

The shortlist also underscored how competitive the field was this year. Other contenders included *On the Calculation of Volume I*, *Small Boat*, *Under the Eye of the Big Bird*, *Perfection*, and *A Leopard-Skin Hat*. But the judges ultimately settled on a book that combines craft, locality, and social observation in a way that had wide appeal. Last year’s winner was *Kairos* by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann, which gives the 2025 result a clear place in a recent sequence of internationally visible translated fiction.

For Mushtaq, the award adds global visibility to a body of work written over decades. The Guardian said Bhasthi selected and translated the 12 stories from around 50 stories across six collections written over 30 years. That timeline matters because it shows the prize was not just for a single new publication but for a longer literary career brought together in one volume. The result positions *Heart Lamp* as both a breakthrough for short-story collections and a reminder that translated fiction can still reshape the contours of a major prize.

Claim-to-source map - *Heart Lamp* won the 2025 International Booker Prize on 2025-05-20: Guardian source 5167 - The book is the first short story collection to win the prize and Deepa Bhasthi is the first Indian translator winner: Guardian source 5167 - The prize money, venue, and judging details: Guardian source 5167 - The shortlist and last year’s winner: Guardian source 5167