Indian writer, lawyer, and activist Banu Mushtaq has won the prestigious International Booker Prize for her short story collection Heart Lamp. She is the first author writing in Kannada to receive this global award, which honours the best translated fiction from around the world.

Banu will share the £50,000 (about ₹56 lakh or $67,000) prize money with her translator, Deepa Bhasthi, who also helped select the stories in the book. At the award ceremony held at the Tate Modern gallery in London, Banu said, "This moment feels like a thousand fireflies lighting up one sky short, beautiful, and shared by many. I accept this award not as just one person, but as a voice among many."

She also explained that her stories focus on women and how religion, society, and politics force them to obey blindly, often treating them cruelly and reducing them to a lower position.

About Banu Mushtaq

Banu Mushtaq is a 77-year-old writer, lawyer, and activist from Hassan, Karnataka. She writes mainly in Kannada, but her work has also been published in Urdu, Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam, and recently, English. She started school at the age of 8 in a Kannada missionary school in Shivamogga. Although she was expected to learn Kannada in six months, she began writing just a few days after joining. Banu later worked as a reporter for the newspaper Lankesh Patrike and briefly at All India Radio in Bengaluru.

Banu has been a strong voice for women's rights, especially within the Muslim community. Because she supported Muslim women’s right to enter mosques, her family faced a three-month social boycott. In the early 2000s, she joined a civil rights group called Komu Souhardha Vedike and took part in protests against efforts to stop Muslims from visiting a shared religious site at Baba Budangiri in Chikmagalur, Karnataka.

Banu Mushtaq has received several other awards for her work, including the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award, the Daana Chintamani Attimabbe Award, and the 2024 PEN English Translate Award.Her prize-winning book Heart Lamp is a collection of 12 short stories written between 1990 and 2023. The stories focus on daily life in Muslim communities in southern India, especially highlighting the lives of women and girls.

Max Porter, the head of the judging panel, praised Heart Lamp as something truly fresh for English readers. He called it “a radical translation” that plays with language in new ways and helps readers see translation from a broader, more creative perspective.