I know what you read this summer

Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga, Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series, the Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan: the names trip easily off their tongues. But ask them about Young Adult (YA) books written by Indian authors that rolled off the presses this past summer and you hear a studied silence.

“I generally don’t read books by Indian authors,” says Kinnisha Michellin Andrew, a third-year student of Mount Carmel college.

Andrew, a voracious reader, gets most of her recommendations for books from her college peer group or from social networks for bookworms (Shelfari, Goodreads). She is currently reading the latest in the Hunger Games series (Mockingjay) and Name of the Wind, the first book in yet another fantasy series The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss.

The hyper-success of Twilight was supposed to draw all these young readers into bookstores and into exploring the burgeoning YA literature from India. This past summer, a large number of young Indian writers have published their books; among them are Samit Basu with his Terror on the Titanic: A Morningstar Agency Adventure, star blogger Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan with The Confessions of a Listmaniac, Vodafone-Crossword book award winner Siddhartha Sarma with The Grasshopper’s Run (all three published by Scholastic India), Giti Chandra with The Fang of Summoning (Hachette India) and Tushar Raheja with Run Romi Run (Roli).

Full report here DNA

The day of the Grasshopper

As Siddhartha Sarma claimed the first Crossword Award for the Best Children’s Book in Mumbai this week, a bunch of writers at the Jumpstart festival were asking a key question: Should adults read books for children?

Technically, The Grasshopper’s Run is a children’s book — published by Scholastic last year in the emerging category of fiction for young adults. This is a growing segment of readers in India, and an important one: historically, despite the wide variety of literature for children, we haven’t had much literature for teenagers and young adults, across most Indian languages. But as writers from Paro Anand to Samit Basu know, writing for children or young adults effectively consigns the author to invisibility on the book-review pages. This means that kids, and teens, will read Sarma’s book — but adults will miss out.

And that would be a shame. Sarma’s real audience, as he says on his blog, is “all you closet Commando readers” — or anyone interested in the almost-forgotten Japanese siege of Kohima in 1944. “The (Second World) war touched India in many places, but the only region invaded on the mainland was the North-east,” Sarma writes. “It was a time of great misery, great courage and remarkable events. But if you expect much fiction about India and the war, forget it. Mostly it is because a couple of years after the war we began a bigger adventure: Independence and the rest of the jing-bang. People weren’t really into what their soldiers did fighting for another country in some far-off place.”

Full report here Business Standard

Explore the world of children's books

Joint-the-Dots to be held shortly will have panel discussions, open forums and seminars on children's books.

A lot of work goes behind every book that is published, and a children's book is no different. It is with the aim to explore and understand the world of children's books that New Delhi will host Jumpstart 2010.

Join the Dots, a two-day event being organised by the German Book Office will be held on August 20 and 21 at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts. Along with numerous panel discussions, open forums and seminars on children's books, it will witness the coming together of leading writers, publishers, booksellers and library experts involved with and interested in children's literature.

The event will bring together personalities from not just India but countries like Norway, Germany, United Kingdom, France and Switzerland. Renate Reichstein, the Vice President of the AVJ - Association of German Children's Book Publishers, will be attending the event, as will Paro Anand, who has published 20 books for children and is a performance storyteller.

Other notable personalities at Jumpstart include Sarnath Bannerjee, Samit Basu, Anoushka Ravishankar, Anita Roy, Urvashi Bhutalia and Karthika V. K.

Full report here Hindu

Ya, Mowgli son is on!

The 30-something author, who published his first book eight years ago, is now a veteran of a three-book fantasy series, some cool comics, a couple of screenplays and now a new series of “Young Adult” fiction, called YA. The YA list of Scholastic has kicked off with Basu’s ‘Morningstar Agency’ adventure series with the first title Terror on the Titanic just out on the shelf.

The book, launched at the South City Mall Starmark on Thursday, is about Nathaniel Brown, a Morningstar agent, who is on the Titanic to prevent a jewel from reaching America. He is Mowgli’s son.

Samit spoke on Indian publishing opening up to young readers and the may genres. “The world over it has been a golden age for children’s literature since 2001 with Harry Potter, Lisbeth Salander, the Percy Jackson series and so on.” But in India, there were only RK Narayan and Ruskin Bond, nothing contemporary. Kalpana Swaminathan was appreciated abroad but not in India, feels Samit.

The reason is not far to seek. “With poor marketing budgets, books weren’t getting visibility.” Except a Vikram Seth or someone with a million-pound advance. Samit was interested in writing a book for children. “But I write to make a living. I wouldn’t really be interested in something that wouldn’t sell. Besides, publishers didn’t want to touch anything unless they were sure of numbers.”
 
Full report here Telegraph

Samit Basu on the road

It’s a pleasure to be called a young author. These days authors, like footballers, are over the hill at 30,” says Samit Basu, who has written the GameWorld Trilogy, India’s first science fiction/fantasy series. Basu is in Bangalore to promote his new book Terror on the Titanic: A Morningstar Agency Adventure, written with young adult readers in mind, and while he is a youthful 30, he cannot help but be aware that some others writing in this genre are barely out of their teens themselves.

Basu, who wrote his first novel (The Simoqin Prophecies, Part I of the GameWorld Trilogy) in his early twenties and became a published author at 24, is not exactly a stranger to precocious literary fame. In the years since he dropped out of IIM Ahmedabad because his heart was not in it, Basu went to the UK for a course in film-making, wrote his first book, became a journalist in Delhi and later, a full-time author.

Not satisfied with writing a richly plotted fantasy series teeming with characters, sub-plots and allusions each more lively than the other, Basu, a huge fan of comic-books, has also written comics series Devi and The Tall Tales of Vishnu Sharma (published by Bangalore-based Virgin comics) and co-written a graphic novel Untouchable with Mike Carey of Lucifer and X-Men fame.

Full report here DNA