What is the title of the book by Banu Mushtaq that won the 2025 International Booker Prize?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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) 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) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2025 Q34 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q34 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer