BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 34 of 150

Correct — B, Heart Lamp. The book is *Heart Lamp: Selected Stories*, twelve short stories that Banu Mushtaq wrote in Kannada between 1990 and 2023, chosen and translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi and first published in the United Kingdom by And Other Stories on 10 September 2024. It took the 2025 International Booker Prize at a ceremony at Tate Modern in London on 20 May 2025 — just under four months before this 13 September 2025 paper — and it broke two records in the same moment: it is the first work written in Kannada to win the International Booker, and the first collection of short stories ever to win it, the prize having gone to a novel in every previous year. Under the International Booker's rules the £50,000 is divided equally between author and translator, so Deepa Bhasthi took £25,000 and became the first Indian translator to win the award. The stories follow the lives of Muslim women in southern India and turn on patriarchy, gender inequality and endurance; the collection belongs to the Bandaya Sahitya tradition of Kannada writing, a protest literature that attacks caste, class and religious oppression — the movement Banu Mushtaq, a lawyer and activist from Karnataka as well as a writer, has worked inside for decades. She has published six short-story collections, a novel, an essay collection and a poetry collection, and her work has been translated into Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and English. The other two options are near-synonym titles assembled from the same two words and correspond to no book on the 2025 longlist or shortlist.

• (a)Light of the Heart — A decoy built by inverting the real title's two halves — 'heart' survives while 'lamp' softens into 'light'. No book of this name sits on the 2025 International Booker longlist or shortlist, and none belongs to Banu Mushtaq, whose published work runs to six Kannada short-story collections, a novel, an essay collection and a poetry collection. It is aimed squarely at the candidate who read the May 2025 headline and retained the imagery of the title rather than its exact words.
• (c)Soul Lantern — The mirror-image decoy: it keeps the lamp half of the title and replaces 'heart' with 'soul'. Options are built this way because the memory of a title decays into its imagery long before it decays into nothing, so 'a lamp, and something about the heart or the soul' feels like knowledge while carrying none. The winning title is exactly *Heart Lamp: Selected Stories*, and a title question accepts nothing looser than the exact words.
• (d)More than one of the above — The International Booker goes to a single translated work each year — what is shared is the prize money between the author and the translator of that one book, never the award between two books — so no combination of titles can stand. The paper-level odds matter too: 'More than one of the above' is offered on 44 of these 150 questions and the official final key marks it correct on only 6 of them, so using it as shelter on a plain recall question, with one-third of a mark deducted for a wrong answer, is a bad trade.

The International Booker Prize and the Booker Prize are two different awards run by the same foundation, and telling them apart is what most questions in this area are really testing. The Booker Prize proper goes to a work of long-form fiction originally written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. The International Booker goes to a single book translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland, and its defining rule is that the £50,000 is split equally between author and translator — translation is treated as an equal creative act, not a service rendered. It has taken that annual, single-book shape only since 2016; before that it was the Man Booker International Prize, awarded once every two years to a living author of any nationality for a whole body of work and worth £60,000, which is why a question about the prize before 2016 behaves quite differently from one about it after. Because eligibility turns on translation, this is one of the very few global stages on which literature written in an Indian language — as opposed to Indian writing in English — competes directly and on its own terms. India has now won it twice: Geetanjali Shree's *Tomb of Sand* (*Ret Samadhi*), translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, in 2022, the first novel in any Indian language to win; and Banu Mushtaq's *Heart Lamp*, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, in 2025.

This is a recall question in disguise, and the disguise is lexical rather than factual: all three titles are assembled from the same small vocabulary of light and the heart, so a candidate who has retained 'something with a lamp in it' still faces a one-in-three problem. The discriminating move is to store the win as a five-part bundle instead of as a title — author Banu Mushtaq, book *Heart Lamp: Selected Stories*, language Kannada, translator Deepa Bhasthi, year 2025. Current-affairs papers pick any one of those five and ask you to supply another, and the bundle answers every permutation while a memorised title answers only one. The second check is genre, because genre is the fact that made this win news at all: *Heart Lamp* is a short-story collection, and every earlier International Booker had gone to a novel. A candidate who can recall 'the year a story collection won' has already thrown out any option that would have to be a novel. Anchor it to the exam calendar as well — the prize was announced on 20 May 2025 and the paper was sat on 13 September 2025, a gap of under four months, which is exactly the window BPSC's current-affairs section harvests. Questions set in that window are almost always about an event with one unambiguous, widely reported name, and the correct option will be that exact name rather than a graceful paraphrase of it.

• *Heart Lamp: Selected Stories* by Banu Mushtaq won the 2025 International Booker Prize, announced at Tate Modern, London, on 20 May 2025.
• The collection holds twelve stories written in Kannada between 1990 and 2023, translated by Deepa Bhasthi and first published in the UK by And Other Stories on 10 September 2024, with the Indian edition following on 18 February 2025.
• It is the first Kannada-language work and the first short-story collection to win the International Booker; Deepa Bhasthi is the first Indian translator to win the prize, which had gone to a novel every year before 2025.
• The International Booker's £50,000 is divided equally between author and translator — £25,000 each — because the prize counts translation as an equal creative act; before 2016 it was the Man Booker International Prize, given once every two years for a body of work and worth £60,000.
• India's other International Booker win is Geetanjali Shree's *Tomb of Sand* (*Ret Samadhi*), translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, in 2022 — the first novel in an Indian language to take the prize. Banu Mushtaq, a lawyer and activist from Karnataka, has published six short-story collections, a novel, an essay collection and a poetry collection, and writes within the Bandaya Sahitya movement.

• Mixing up the Booker Prize, which is for fiction originally written in English, with the International Booker Prize, which is for a work translated into English
• Naming the author but forgetting the translator — the International Booker is shared equally, and papers ask for Deepa Bhasthi by name as readily as for Banu Mushtaq
• Assuming the winner must be a novel — *Heart Lamp* is the collection of stories that broke exactly that assumption, and that is why the 2025 win was reported as a double first

BPSC asks the title flat and defends it with two sound-alike titles built from the same words, so the marks go to whoever memorised the exact phrase rather than the gist. UPSC has historically taken two routes on this material: 'for which book did X win', as it did with Kiran Desai and *The Inheritance of Loss* in 2007, or a statements question on the prize's own machinery — eligibility, sponsor, nationality of the winner — as in 2005. Store the award, the year, the book, the original language, the translator and the split of the prize money as a single unit and both routes are covered.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Who translated Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp, the 2025 International Booker Prize winner, into English?

  • (a)Daisy Rockwell
  • (b)Deepa Bhasthi
  • (c)Arunava Sinha
  • (d)Jerry Pinto

  Answer(b) Deepa Bhasthi — she translated the stories from Kannada, shared the £50,000 equally with the author and became the first Indian translator to win the International Booker. Daisy Rockwell translated Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand, the 2022 winner.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  With reference to the 2025 International Booker Prize, consider the following statements: 1. The winning work was originally written in Kannada. 2. It was the first short-story collection to win the prize. 3. The prize money is awarded entirely to the author. Which of the statements given above are correct?

  • (a)1 and 2 only
  • (b)2 and 3 only
  • (c)1 and 3 only
  • (d)1, 2 and 3

  Answer(a) 1 and 2 only — statements 1 and 2 are correct; statement 3 is wrong because the £50,000 is divided equally between author and translator, £25,000 each.