The JCB Prize for Literature has shut down. What else has ended with it?

One full month after the announcement of the 2025 International Booker Prize winner, it is difficult to enter a London bookshop without seeing the winning book, Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq’s short story collection Heart Lamp, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, displayed in full glory. From the Foyle’s shop window in Charing Cross to special tables in Waterstones and Hatchard’s, not to mention dozens of independent bookshops, Heart Lamp is, quite literally, everywhere.

While sales figures in the UK are yet to be disclosed publicly, publishers And Other Stories, whose decision to publish the book in the UK made it eligible for the prize, have been working hard to meet the demand from online and in-store buyers. In India, sales are believed to be closing in on the 100,000-mark, an incredible achievement by any standards for a work of serious contemporary fiction, and a translation, and a volume of short stories, at that.

These figures are in the same orbit as the sales of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, the English translation of Ret Samadhi by Daisy Rockwell, which won the International Booker Prize in 2022, and of the Hindi original. Clearly, when an Indian book wins the International Booker Prize for its English translation, readers – some regular, many more sporadic – in the...

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