2025 International Booker Prize: India’s Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi shortlisted for ‘Heart Lamp’

Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi’s Heart Lamp: Selected Stories has made it to the shortlist of the 2025 International Booker Prize. It is the second book from India – after Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell in 2022 – in the history of the prize to make the shortlist.

This year five novels and one collection of short stories are in the running. Heart Lamp was published by Penguin Random House India in India, and by And Other Stories in the UK, in April 2025. It is also the first time that all the books on the shortlist have been published by independent publishers. Nine out of 12 nominees are women, and three authors are in the finals with their debut English-language publications. Of the six books on the shortlist, only one is more than 200 pages.

This year’s jury is chaired by author Max Porter and the other judges are poet and photographer Caleb Femi; writer and Publishing Director of Wasafiri Sana Goyal; author and translator Anton Hur; and singer-songwriter Beth Orton. The judges picked their shortlist from a longlist of 13 books.

The jury said about Heart Lamp, “[…] These stories speak truth to power and slice through the fault lines of caste, class, and religion widespread in contemporary society, exposing the rot within:...

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