On May 20th, 2025, the International Booker Prize was awarded at the Tate Modern in London. This year’s recipient? The short story collection Heart Lamp, penned by Indian author, activist, and lawyer Banu Mushtaq, and translated by Deepa Bhasthi. Her win marks the first ever Indian Muslim to receive the International Booker Prize, and the tenth year of the award’s focus on translated works.
Born in 1977 in the southern region of Karnataka, Banu Mushtaq has long been engaged with writing as a form of truth-telling and change-making. While Heart Lamp is a collection of short stories, she is also a published essayist, novelist, and poet. One of her short works was also adapted in 2003 into a feature film titled Hasina. Mushtaq writes in Kannada, and her works have been translated into Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, and Malayalam, with Heart Lamp being her first book-length title to have an English translation. The 12 stories are selected from a span of several decades of her career, all following young Muslim women in southern India.
History of the International Booker Prize
The International Booker Prize has been around in some respect since 2005, an offshoot of the Booker Prize, which first took form in 1969. The Booker Prize began as a biennial event called the Booker Prize for Fiction. Its title changed to Man Booker Prize when sponsorship by the Man Group began in 2002, then shifted to the Booker Prize when that sponsorship ceased in 2019. At the time of its founding, only authors from the Commonwealth of Nations and Ireland who wrote in English were eligible to submit their novels, but these criteria expanded to accept any English-language novel in 2014.
When the International Booker Prize was first introduced as a sister award to The Booker Prize, judges were evaluating any author’s full body of work written in English. A number of well-renowned English-language writers are scattered through the early shortlists for this reason, including Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Don Delilo, and Lydia Davis. However, 2015 marked a shift in the qualifications for submission, with the award now offered only for single books or short story collections, both published in the UK or Ireland, and translated from a language other than English.
Now, the International Booker Prize exists in tandem with the Booker Prize, in a relationship the Booker Prize’s site calls “symmetrical,” ensuring that “the Booker honours fiction on a global basis.” The International Booker Prize recognizes novels from across the world, honoring authors and translators with not only a split £50,000 prize and trophy, but significant recognition and appreciation for their craft. In recent years, writers from Germany, Bulgaria, India, France, and the Netherlands have received the award.
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
Directly preceding Mushtaq’s win, the 2024 International Booker Prize went to Jenny Erpenbeck for her German-language novel Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann. Erpenbeck’s creative work also includes opera direction and playwriting, having had a successful career in theater before venturing into prose. She was raised in East Berlin, a setting she also chose for the story of Kairos, interweaving the complex and tense political landscape of 1980s Berlin with a relationship between a writer and his younger student. Kairos has been translated into 30 languages.
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov
The 2023 International Booker Prize was received by Georgi Gospodinov, a widely acclaimed writer born in Yambol, Bulgaria. Gospodinov has produced award-winning works in mediums from poetry to graphic novels, but it was his third English-translated novel, Time Shelter, that won the prize. It was translated to English by Angela Rodel, and the story has earned awards across its 25 different languages of translation, including the Italian Premio Strega Europeo Prize. It is a dystopic imagining of a clinic for Alzheimer’s patients, with floors meticulously designed to recreate various eras of the past and reignite their memories.
Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree
Geetanjali Shree was awarded the 2022 International Booker Prize for her Hindi-language novel Tomb of Sand, making her the first author from South Asia to receive the prize. The work was translated by Daisy Rockwell. Shree’s education in history and the works of Indian writer Munshi Premchand, as well as her upbringing in Uttar Pradesh state in northern India, were each influential in her journey to creating her own Hindi literature. Tomb of Sand follows an 80-year-old woman named Ma who grapples with debilitating grief after the death of her husband, and makes a choice to continue experiencing new things despite her circumstances.
At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop
In 2021, the International Booker Prize was awarded to French author David Diop. At Night All Blood is Black, translated by Anna Moschovakis, is the work for which he was recognized. It is Diop’s second novel, and one that has been translated into 13 languages from its original French. Though born in Paris and now a professor at the French University of Pau, Diop was raised in Senegal. At Night All Blood is Black is a story of Senegalese soldiers in the French colonial army in WWI. It explores the mental and physical tortures of war for those unwillingly immersed in the violence as a consequence of colonization.
The Discomfort of Evening by Lucas Rijneveld
Lucas Rijneveld was the 2020 recipient of the International Booker Prize for his debut novel The Discomfort of Evening, translated by Michele Hutchison. Rijneveld is both the first Dutch author to receive the award, and the youngest overall, having been only 29 at the time of his win. The Discomfort of Evening tells the story of a young girl living a strictly religious and regimented life on her family’s dairy farm, until a sudden death turns the household on its head.
These recently recognized authors represent not only many countries across the world, but a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and interests. The variety among them seems to show the International Booker Prize is making progress towards recognition of outstanding fiction on a global scale.
Read more about Banu Mushtaq’s win here!
Find these books on our Translated Works for Your International Tastes list on Bookshop.com
