Heart Lamp: A Radical Translation That Lights Voices

When Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq became the 2025 International Booker Prize winner, it marked history in several ways. It’s the first short-story collection to ever win the award. It’s also the first work translated from Kannada to be honored. The book holds 12 stories gathered from Mushtaq’s writing over more than 30 years. They focus on women’s lives in patriarchal communities in southern India, both the struggles and the quiet strength. Deepa Bhasthi, the translator, was also the curator. She selected the stories, translated them, and gave them a voice in English. What makes this translation “radical”? Bhasthi calls it “translating with an accent.” She lets in the rhythms and local flavor of Kannada, and even leaves some Urdu or Arabic words untouched. The English she uses carries a Kannada hum, reminding us the text comes from another linguistic world. The judges praised how Heart Lamp feels “genuinely new” in English. They saw in it a texture — multiple English styles — that doesn’t flatten the original but extends it. Their praise didn’t just focus on themes of gender and power, but on how the everyday lives in the stories become vivid, memorable, real. For Mushtaq, this win is more than personal. She says it shows how diverse voices can be shared and celebrated globally. The stories don’t just belong to her region — they reach for universal human understanding. In Heart Lamp, we find that translation is not about erasing difference, but carrying it forward — letting readers in another language feel the echo of lives lived elsewhere. The win is a light, a signal, that these voices matter.