The International Booker Prize winner for 2025 is Heart Lamp, a collection of 12 short stories originally written in the Kannada language by Banu Mushtaq and translated to English by Deepa Bhasthi. Heart Lamp is the first collection of short stories to win the prize.
The stories chronicle the lives of women and girls in southern India who live in patriarchal communities. Mushtaq, a lawyer and champion of women’s rights in India, was inspired to write the stories by the experiences of women she had met and spoken to. The stories were written over the course of over 30 years.
In her acceptance speech, Mushtaq highlighted the importance of a global community, united under the idea that no story is small or unimportant.
“This moment feels like a thousand fireflies lighting up a single sky. Brief, brilliant, and utterly collective.”
— Banu Mushtaq, acceptance speech for International Booker Prize 2025
Heart Lamp was one of six books in translation that comprised the shortlist this year. The shortlist included books translated from French, Danish, Japanese, and Italian, about topics as varied as contemporary existence, the imminent extinction of the human race, and time travel.
The International Booker Prize is designed to honor books translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland — it serves as a mirror image to the Booker Prize, which honors books originally published in English. This year, the shortlist was selected from the 13 longlisted books. The prize was awarded by a panel of five judges, including International Booker Prize shortlisted translator Anton Hur and Booker Prize longlisted author Max Porter.
In a speech before announcing the winner of the prize, Porter, the chair of the 2025 judges, spoke about the importance of fiction, particularly translated fiction, in an age where many writers, publishers, and arts institutions are facing attacks, in the form of violence and censorship.
“Translated literature is a way of communicating over a border, under a wall, beyond an algorithm’s reach. We therefore need it more than ever, those of us that believe in the migration of people, languages, ideas and feelings.”
— Max Porter, introduction speech to the International Booker Prize 2025 winner
Heart Lamp is the first book translated from Kannada to win the International Booker Prize. It was also the first book translated from that language to be nominated. Mushtaq is the second Indian author to win the prize, after Geetanjali Shree in 2022.
Bhasthi became the first Indian translator to win the prize. In her speech, she thanked the International Booker Prize for including both writers and writer-translators in its recognition. She focused her speech on the idea that the world and its history can be seen as a history of erasures and that literature and the International Booker Prize represent a small resistance against that by chronicling “how women and those on the many margins of this world live and love.”
“This prize is a small win in a long ongoing battle against such violence.”
— Deepa Bhasthi, acceptance speech for International Booker Prize 2025
The International Booker Prize comes with a £50,000 prize, divided equally between the author and the translator. Each shortlisted author and translator also receives £2,500.
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