Writer, activist and lawyer Banu Mushtaq's short story collection 'Heart Lamp' became the first Kannada title to win the coveted International Booker Prize in London with a prize money of GBP 50,000 on Tuesday.
Mushtaq reportedly described her win as a victory for diversity as she collected the prize at바카라¯a ceremony at Tate Modern바카라¯along with her translator Deepa Bhasthi, who translated the title from Kannada to English.
'Heart Lamp' was shortlisted among six worldwide titles.
What Did Banu Mushtaq Say?
According to PTI, Mushtaq바카라™s work appealed to the judges for its 바카라œwitty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating바카라 style of capturing portraits of family and community tensions.
Mushtaq said, "This book was born from the belief that no story is ever small, that in the tapestry of human experience every thread holds the weight of the whole."
"In a world that often tries to divide us, literature remains one of the lost sacred spaces where we can live inside each other's minds, if only for a few pages," she said.
Translator Bhashti added: "What a beautiful win this is for my beautiful language."
What Is International Booker Prize?
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.
Each shortlisted title is awarded a prize of GBP 5,000 바카라“ shared between author and translator and the winning prize money is split between Mushtaq and Bhashti, who receive GBP 25,000 each.
The other five books on the shortlisted included: 바카라˜On the Calculation of Volume I바카라™ by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland; 바카라˜Small Boat바카라™ by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson; 바카라˜Under the Eye of the Big Bird바카라™ by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda; 바카라˜Perfection바카라™ by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes; and 바카라˜A Leopard-Skin Hat바카라™ by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson.
Max Porter, International Booker Prize 2025 Chair of judges, said: 바카라œThis list is our celebration of fiction in translation as a vehicle for pressing and surprising conversations about humanity. These mind-expanding books ask what might be in store for us, or how we might mourn, worship or survive. They offer knotty, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes radically hopeful answers to these questions.
"Taken together they build a miraculous lens through which to view human experience, both the truly disturbing and the achingly beautiful. They are each highly specific windows onto a world, but they are all gorgeously universal."
In 2022, Geetanjali Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell won the coveted prize for the first-ever Hindi novel 바카라˜Tomb of Sand바카라™, with Perumal Murugan바카라™s Tamil novel 바카라˜Pyre바카라™, translated into English by Aniruddhan Vasudevan making it to the longlist in 2023.
