Banu Mushtaq received this year’s International Booker Prize for Heart Lamp. A collection of 12 short stories translated into English from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi. It is the second Indian work to win the £50,000 award. The first was Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell’s Tomb of Sand in 2022.

Heart Lamp collection of 12 short stories written over a period of more than 30 years. It chronicle the everyday lives and struggles of women in southern India. It becomes the first short story collection to take the award. Also Bhasthi, the first Indian translator to win the award.

Last year’s winner was Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann.

The International Booker Prize is the world’s most influential award for translated fiction. The award celebrates the best works of long-form fiction or collections of short stories translated into English. And published in the UK and/or Ireland. It recognises the vital work of translators, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between authors and translators. In addition, shortlisted authors and translators each receive £2,500.

Booker Prize ensures that the Booker honours fiction on a global basis. World-class fiction highlighted by the prizes for English-speaking readers, whether that work was originally written in English (the Booker Prize) or translated into English (the International Booker Prize).

Five Indians have won the prestigious Booker Prize award. VS Naipaul won the award for In a Free State in 1971. Salman Rushdie for Midnight’s Children in 1981. Arundhati Roy for The God of Small Things in 1997. Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss in 2006. Aravind Adiga for The White Tiger in 2008.

Booker Prize:

The award constituted in 1969 and every year, the prize given best novel written in English and published in the UK. Until 2014, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize. In 2014, the ambit widened, and any English-language novel was open for consideration for the award.