“Exploring the lives of those often on the periphery of society – girls and women in Muslim communities in southern India – these vivid stories hold immense emotional and moral weight” – is how the judges describe Indian author Banu Mushtaq’s book on the 2025 International Booker Prize, released this week.
‘Heart Lamp’, translated by fellow Karnataka-based writer Deepa Bhasthi, marks the first time a Kannada title has made it to the 13-strong longlist of the £50,000 literary prize – divided equally between author and translator.
The prize panel said: “Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.
“Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters – the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost – that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style.”
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Its 12 stories set in southern India will now go head-to-head with authors and translators from across the world. The annual prize celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between May 2024 and April 2025.
The six books shortlisted from the longlist for this year’s prize will be announced on April 8, with each shortlisted title awarded a prize of £5,000 – shared between author and translator. The announcement of the 2025 winning title will take place May 20 at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London, with the winning author receiving £25,000 and the translator or translators dividing the other half.
Max Porter, chair of the judging panel for International Booker Prize 2025, said: “Translated fiction is not an elite or rarefied cultural space requiring expert knowledge; it is the exact opposite. It is stories of every conceivable kind from everywhere, for everyone. It is a miraculous way in which we might meet one another in all our strangeness and sameness, and defy the borders erected between us.
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“In these books people are sharing strategies for survival; they are cheating, lying, joking and innovating. Some people are no longer of this earth, or they are sending visions from the future or from parallel universes. These books bring us into the agony of family, workplace or nation-state politics, the near-spiritual secrecy of friendship, the inner architecture of erotic feeling, the banality of capitalism and the agitations of faith.”
