‘Heart Lamp’ by Banu Mushtaq — in its translation to English by Deepa Bhasthi — is the winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize. This image pictures the book in the context of the Booker Foundation’s ‘Feast of Fiction’ campaign. Image: Booker Foundation
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘Beautiful, Busy, Life-Affirming Stories’
This evening (May 20) at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London, it has been announced that Heart Lamp: Selected Stories by India’s Banu Mushtaq and translated by Deepa Bhasthi is the winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize. This is the first win for the independent publisher And Other Stories, although its work has been nominated six times.
This honor, the brother award to the better-known Booker Prize for Fiction, is focused on translated work and was established in 2005. The win pays £50,000 (US$66,901), which is divided between the winning author and translator (or translators where a book has more than one). Each of the shortlisted titles is also given £5,000 (US$6,690).
Of special interest to those who appreciate stories, Heart Lamp is the first short-story collection to win the International Booker. It was written across three decades and comprises 12 stories that look at the lives of women in patriarchal communities of southern India.
While Bhasthi is the first Indian translator to win the award, Mushtaq is the second Indian author to win it. The book is written in Kannada, a Dravidian language spoken mainly in the southwestern state of Karnataka.
Max Porter
In announcing the rationale for the selection, jury chair Max Porter says, “Heart Lamp is something genuinely new for English readers. A radical translation which ruffles language, to create new textures in a plurality of Englishes.
“It challenges and expands our understanding of translation. These beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories rise from Kannada, interspersed with the extraordinary socio-political richness of other languages and dialects. It speaks of women’s lives, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power and oppression.
“This was the book the judges really loved, right from our first reading. It’s been a joy to listen to the evolving appreciation of these stories from the different perspectives of the jury. We are thrilled to share this timely and exciting winner of the International Booker Prize 2025 with readers around the world.”
These are the first nominations for both author Mushtaq and translator Bhasthi. Heart Lamp is Mushtaq’s first English-language publication.
Mushtaq is the second Indian author to win the prize, the first being Geetanjali Shree who won in 2022 for Tomb of Sand, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell.
Fiametta Rocco
Fiammetta Rocco, the administrator of the International Booker, says, “Heart Lamp, stories written by a great advocate of women’s rights over three decades and translated with sympathy and ingenuity, should be read by men and women all over the world.
“The book speaks to our times, and to the ways in which many are silenced. In a divided world, a younger generation is increasingly connecting with global stories that have been skillfully reworked for English-language readers through the art of translation. …
“Next year the prize celebrates 10 years in its current form, and I’m optimistic that the anniversary will lead more people to discover and embrace great translated fiction.”
In a field of relatively short books (four of the six shortlistees are under 200 pages each), Heart Lamp is the next-to-longest, at just over 200 pages. You’ll find the shortlist repeated below. And the Booker Foundation has added an informational feature on Heart Lamp, which you can find here.
Market Impact Notes
Author Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi are winners of the 2025 International Booker Prize. Image: Booker Foundation
As Publishing Perspectives readers know, the Booker Prize Foundation has been an industry leader in reporting various angles of marketplace impact on its winning titles, authors, and publishers. This is something we encourage more publishing and book competitions to do, and are pleased to report that since we began reporting on this, the £25,000 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and the £50,000 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction have begun developing statistics and reports on their own accolades’ market impact. We’ve also had word that the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is planning to report on this from its influential National Translation Awards.
The basis for this is simple. Without knowing what sort of effect a win may have, the publishers, authors, and readers of the world are asked simply to assume that the myriad competitions in world publishing are actually helping to raise the visibility and readership of good work. This, as more and more awards programs open, and more and more consumers’ eyes glaze over.
Nothing speaks like numbers. And the Booker team has unfailingly provided them for several seasons now, a fine example for other competitions.
Today, we have this update from the foundation.
“The announcement of the 2024 winner, Kairos, written by Jenny Erpenbeck and translated from German by Michael Hofmann, was reported in more than 2,500 news articles around the world.
German edition, Penguin Verlag
“According to Granta Books, the UK publisher of Kairos, sales of the paperback increased by 442 percent in the week after winning the International Booker Prize 2024. Prior to the winner announcement in May 2024, it had sold 10,000 copies across all editions; since, it has sold nearly 80,000 copies. Granta Books has sold 30,000 of these copies through UK retailers, a 17-percent increase in sales of the 2023 winner over the same period.
“Prior to its longlisting, translation rights to Kairos had been sold into 16 territories; that has now increased to 33 territories. In Germany, Erpenbeck and Hofmann’s home country, the original edition of Kairos sold out at many booksellers the day after its win, rising to the Top 20 of bestseller lists in all editions and reaching No. 1 in paperback for the first time since publication. Its German publisher, Penguin Verlag, reports that before it had won the International Booker Prize in May 2024, it had sold just over 50,000 copies across all editions since its publication in 2021; in June 2024, the month after its win, it sold more than 90,000 copies. It has now sold more than 230,000 copies.
“The prize has helped to drive a boom in translated fiction in the United Kingdom, with print sales in 2023 reaching a record £26 million (US$34.8 million), up by 12 percent on the previous year, according to Nielsen BookData. This is largely down to younger readers, with almost half of translated fiction in the UK bought by consumers younger than 35. According to The Bookseller, translated fiction sales have doubled since the International Booker Prize launched in its current form nine years ago, with ‘roughly £1 in every £8 spent through NielsenIQ BookScan’s Fiction category over the past year … on a translated title.’
“The prize’s influence also extends to other awards, with four authors recognized by the International Booker Prize since 2016 going on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.”
This kind of explication of marketplace effect, needless to say, not only helps to establish the efficacy of book and publishing awards, but also brings to them the light of kindly press coverage, something few competition organizers seem not to want.
The 2025 International Booker Prize Shortlist
The 2025 International Booker Prize shortlist. Image: Booker Foundation
| Title | Original Language | Author | Author Nationality | Translator(s) | Translator Nationality | UK Publisher/Imprint |
| On the Calculation of Volume 1 | Danish | Solvej Balle | Danish | Barbara J Haveland | Scottish | Faber & Faber |
| Small Boat | French | Vincent Delacroix | French | Helen Stevenson | British | Small Axes |
| Under the Eye of the Big Bird | Japanese | Hiromi Kawakami | Japanese | Asa Yoneda | Japanese | Granta Books |
| Perfection | Italian | Vincenzo Latronico | Italian | Sophie Hughes | British | Fitzcarraldo Editions |
| Heart Lamp | Kannada | Banu Mushtaq | Indian | Deepa Bhasthi | Indian | And Other Stories |
| A Leopard-Skin Hat | French | Anne Serre | French | Mark Hutchinson | British | Lolli Editions |
Joining Max Porter on the jury panel this year are poet, director, and photographer Caleb Femi; writer and publishing director of Wasafiri Sana Goyal; author and International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator Anton Hur; and singer-songwriter Beth Orton.
Eligible works were translated into English and published in the United Kingdom and/or Ireland between 1 May 2024 and 30 April 2025.
Jurors for the 2025 International Booker Prize are, from left, Sana Goyal; Beth Orton; Anton Hur; Max Porter; and Caleb Femi. Image: Booker Foundation, Neo Gilder
More from Publishing Perspectives on both Booker Prize programs is here. More on the International Booker Prize is here, more on translation is here, and more from us on international publishing and book awards programs in general is here.