The room was loud in London, and quieter in Hassan. On the night of the twentieth of May, 2025, Banu Mushtaq, a seventy-seven-year-old lawyer, activist and writer from southern Karnataka, became the first writer to win the International Booker Prize for a short story collection. Her book, ‘Heart Lamp’, twelve stories chosen by translator Deepa Bhasthi from three decades of Mushtaq’s work, was the first work translated from Kannada to take the prize. The split fifty-fifty award of fifty thousand pounds was, briefly, the most talked-about literary news in India.
