London: Heart Lamp, a short story collection by Indian writer, activist, and lawyer Banu Mushtaq, has become the first-ever Kannada title to win the prestigious £50,000 International Booker Prize. The award was announced on Tuesday night at a ceremony held at Tate Modern in London.

Mushtaq, who accepted the award alongside translator Deepa Bhasthi, hailed the win as a victory for diversity and regional literature. Heart Lamp, shortlisted alongside five other international titles, was praised by the judges for its “witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating” portrayal of family and community tensions.

“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,” said Mushtaq during her acceptance speech.

“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.”

Bhasthi, who translated the work from Kannada into English, called the award “a beautiful win for my beautiful language”.

The International Booker Prize recognises outstanding works of long-form fiction or short story collections translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland between May 2024 and April 2025. The £50,000 prize is shared equally between the author and translator, with each receiving £25,000. All shortlisted titles are also awarded £5,000, split between their writers and translators.

Chair of the 2025 judging panel, Max Porter, described the shortlisted books as “a celebration of fiction in translation as a vehicle for pressing and surprising conversations about humanity”, adding:

“These mind-expanding books offer knotty, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes radically hopeful answers to the biggest questions. They are each highly specific windows onto a world, but they are all gorgeously universal.”

Other shortlisted works included:

On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle (Danish), translated by Barbara J. Haveland

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix (French), translated by Helen Stevenson

Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami (Japanese), translated by Asa Yoneda

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (Italian), translated by Sophie Hughes

A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre (French), translated by Mark Hutchinson

Mushtaq's win follows a rising recognition of Indian languages in world literature. In 2022, Geetanjali Shree and translator Daisy Rockwell became the first Hindi-language winners with Tomb of Sand, while Perumal Murugan’s Tamil novel Pyre made the longlist in 2023.