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Time of India
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq wins International Booker Prize 2025
HASSAN: " Heart Lamp ," a collection of short stories penned by city based Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq , won the prestigious International Booker Prize 2025 . This book was translated from Kannada to English by Madikeri-based translator Deepa Bhasthi. Banu Mushtaq, an advocate and journalist, established herself as a writer, storyteller, poet, novelist, and social activist. At a ceremony held at London's Tate Modern, Author Max Porter, who chaired the 2025 judging panel, revealed the victorious book - notably the first short story collection to receive this prestigious award. Max Porter said, "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. " He emphasised that these vibrant and uplifting narratives emerge from Kannada, incorporating the remarkable socio-political depth of various languages and dialects. The stories address women's experiences, reproductive rights, faith, caste, power structures, and oppression. During the award presentation, he stated, "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."
The Guardian
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Radical translation' of Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq wins International Booker prize
Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, has won this year's International Booker prize for translated fiction, becoming the first short story collection to take the award. The stories were originally written in Kannada, the official language of the state of Karnataka in southern India. Described by the author and chair of judges Max Porter as 'something genuinely new for English readers: a radical translation' of 'beautiful, busy, life-affirming stories', Heart Lamp's 12 tales chronicle the lives of women in patriarchal communities in southern India. They were selected as well as translated by Bhasthi, the first Indian translator to win the award. She chose them from around 50 stories in six collections written by Mushtaq over a 30-year-period. The £50,000 prize – shared equally between writer and translator – was presented at the Tate Modern in London on Tuesday evening, where a video of actor Ambika Mod reading from the winning title was also shown. Writing about the shortlist in the Guardian, John Self said Mushtaq and Bhasthi's 'wonderful collection' would be a 'worthy winner'. The tone of the book 'varies from quiet to comic, but the vision is consistent', he wrote. Porter said he and his fellow judges – poet Caleb Femi, writer and Guardian critic Sana Goyal, author and translator Anton Hur and musician Beth Orton – spent six hours deliberating, during which they 'argued a lot' before 'unanimously' deciding the winner. Though Porter said they were looking for the 'best book' above all else, he called Heart Lamp a 'really special book in terms of its politics'. The stories 'contain the feminism for which [Mushtaq] is known. And they contain extraordinary accounts of patriarchal systems and resistance,' he added. 'But they aren't activist stories. First and foremost they're beautiful accounts of everyday life and particularly the lives of women.' Porter also praised Bhasthi's translation, which he said 'celebrates the movement from one language to another. It contains a multiplicity of Englishes. It is a translation with a texture.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion 'When one translates, the aim is to introduce the reader to new words,' Bhasthi said in an interview with earlier this year. 'I call it translating with an accent, which reminds the reader that they are reading a work set in another culture, without exoticising it, of course. So the English in Heart Lamp is an English with a very deliberate Kannada hum to it.' The other books shortlisted for the prize were On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland; Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson; Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda; Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes; and A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson. Last year's winner was Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann. Previous winners include Olga Tokarczuk and translator Jennifer Croft, Lucas Rijneveld and translator Michele Hutchison and Han Kang and translator Deborah Smith.
New York Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In a First, a Story Collection Wins the International Booker Prize
A collection of stories about Indian Muslim women's daily struggles with bothersome husbands, mothers and religious leaders, on Tuesday won this year's International Booker Prize, the major award for fiction translated into English. Banu Mushtaq's 'Heart Lamp,' translated from the original Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, is the first story collection to win the prestigious award. The prize comes with 50,000 pounds, or about $66,700, which the author and translator will split equally. Established in 2005, the International Booker Prize was originally awarded to an author for their entire body of work and Alice Munro, the short-story writer, was an early recipient. But since 2016, it has been given to a single book translated into English and published in Britain or Ireland during the previous 12 months and no collection had won until Tuesday. Max Porter, an author and the chair of this year's judges, said in a news conference that 'Heart Lamp' contained 'extraordinary accounts of patriarchal systems and resistance,' while the way Bhasthi had translated the collection was unique. Most translations aim to be 'invisible' so that readers wouldn't know the book wasn't originally written in English, Porter said. But, he added, Bhasthi's translation was the opposite, and 'Heart Lamp' was filled with Indian expressions and ways of talking that gave its 12 stories 'an extraordinary vibrancy.' 'A lot of English readers will find it unlike anything they've ever read before,' Porter said. 'Heart Lamp' beat five other shortlisted titles, including Solvej Balle's 'On the Calculation of Volume: 1,' translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, about an antiquarian bookseller who relives the same day over and over, and Vincenzo Latronico's 'Perfection,' translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes, which follows an expatriate couple in hip Berlin. In contrast to those novels, which many reviewers in both Britain and the United States had praised, 'Heart Lamp' had received little media attention before Tuesday's announcement. Only one major daily British newspaper had given the collection a dedicated review, with Lucy Popescu in The Financial Times writing that Mushtaq's 'deceptively simple tales decry the subjugation of women while celebrating their resilience.' Kate McLoughlin, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, said Mushtaq's stories were 'searing, phantasmagorical, unclassifiable.' In the collection's title story, a woman visits her family to plead with them to let her leave her adulterous husband. After they dismiss her concerns, the woman considers suicide. In another story, 'Black Cobras,' a woman pleads with a religious leader to make her husband pay their child's medical bills, and he ignores her request. Mushtaq, 77, said in a recent interview for the Booker Prize's website that her stories were 'about women — how religion, society and politics demand unquestioning obedience from them, and in doing so, inflict inhumane cruelty upon them, turning them into subordinates.' Having worked as a lawyer, journalist and activist, Mushtaq said in the interview that her stories were inspired by both news reports and women that she'd met while working. She said she didn't do extra research. 'My heart itself is my field of study,' Mushtaq said: 'The more intensely the incidence affects me, the more deeply and emotionally I write.' Max Porter, the chair of the judges, said the 12 stories were far from simple depictions of oppressed Muslim women. Mushtaq's stories contained bravery, wit and satire, Porter said, adding: 'They'll challenge Western stereotypes of Muslim life in the most beautiful and exciting way.'
Gulf Weekly
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Weekly
Vying for the Booker
Six remarkable works of translated fiction have been shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, announced earlier this month, notably all published by independent presses. Each offering unique perspectives on contemporary human experiences, the books shed a light on French, Danish, Japanese, Italian and Kannada literature. 'This shortlist is the result of a life-enhancing conversation between myself and my fellow judges. Reading 154 books in six months made us feel like high-speed Question Machines hurtling through space,' the 2025 jury's chair Max Porter said. 'Our selected six awakened an appetite in us to question the world around us: How am I seeing or being seen? How are we translating each other, all the time? How are we trapped in our bodies, in our circumstances, in time, and what are our options for freedom? Who has a voice? In discussing these books we have been considering again and again what it means to be a human being now.' The winner of the £50,000 prize, to be split equally between the author and translator, will be announced on May 20 at London's Tate Modern. Here are the shortlisted titles:
Euronews
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
New languages and old queer classics: International Booker Prize releases longlist
From tales of Palestinian disappearances to the first translation of a Dutch queer classic, the International Booker Prize longlist is once again a smorgasbord of fascinating fiction from around the world. Established in 2005 as a biennial prize to celebrate longform fiction translated into English, alongside the Booker Prize, the International Booker recognises the best of international fiction, and awards both the original writer and the translator. For this year's longlist, 154 books were submitted which were combed over by the judging panel including bestselling Booker Prize-longlisted author Max Porter as chair. Porter is joined by poet, director and photographer Caleb Femi; writer and Publishing Director Sana Goyal; author and International Booker Prize-shortlisted translator Anton Hur; and award-winning singer-songwriter Beth Orton. '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,' Porter said. 'As we searched for our longlist amongst the 154 books submitted, we marvelled at what the world was thinking. How are people making sense of these times using the novel as a vehicle for thought and feeling?' he added. Nominees represent 15 nationalities across five continents, with Romanian and Surinamese-Dutch writers and an Iraqi translator featuring for the first time. The longlist also brakes new linguistic ground for the prize, featuring books translated from southwestern Indian language Kannada and Romanian. It's also a notably brief collection of books. Of the 13 books, 11 are under 250 pages with the shortest coming in at 97 pages. Only Mircea Cărtărescu's 'Solenoid' breaks the 300-page ceiling at 627 pages. All the authors are first-time nominees, with four translators returning to the list. It's Sophie Hughes' fifth nomination. Hughes' pick marks a record for the prize and the first time she's been rewarded for an Italian translation after being recognised for her work translating from Spanish. Many of the nominees are already acclaimed works in their original language. Danish author Solvej Balle won the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize for her word-of-mouth first volume of a septology, "On the Calculation of Volume I". French author from Réunion Gaëlle Bélem France's Grand prix du roman métis for her debut novel "There's a Monster Behind the Door". The longest gap between original publication and translation is also represented with the English translation of Astrid Roemer's Dutch queer literature classic "On a Woman's Madness". First published in 1982, it has finally been translated into English by Lucy Scott. This year's International Booker Prize will announce its shortlist of six finalists on 8 April. All six finalists will each receive £5,000 (€6,000) to be split equally between writer and translator. On 20 May, the winner will be revealed at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London. The winner will get £50,000 (€60,000), once again split between author and translator. The full list of the nominees are as follows:
