The Publisher’s Post: Vol I Ed. XLVII
Dated: 3rd Aug 2008
The Publisher’s Post is a weekly newsletter that contains information relating to the book publishing and book selling industry in India.
News This Week
On what’s happened in the industry this last week. If there’s news you have heard of and think it would make for interesting reading, please share it with us.
Katha announces Writing and Illustration contest for children
Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Katha is conducting a nationwide hunt for Master Storytellers and Artists through its Short Story Writing and Illustration Contest. The contest is open to school students from all over India from classes 8-12. Last date to submit entries is September 15, 2008.
The prize winners will be invited to Katha Youth Utsav (Caution! Ideas at work) – at the Katha Short Stories/Illustrations Awards Ceremony. There is a grand first prize of Rs. 10,000/- each for the best writer and illustrator plus participation in the Katha Youth Utsav, 2008 in New Delhi. Second prizes for 30 lucky students who will be awarded grants to participate in the Utsav. The winners will be eligible for a waiver of the festival registration fee and will win themselves workshops with an eminent writer!
The story should not be more than eight pages. You can write about a fantasy, or about leaders, teachers, common man, artists, taxi-drivers, rag pickers or business tycoons.
For illustrations, you can draw your own story. Or pick up a short story and illustrate – a minimum of three illustrations to be submitted. (Please exclude Panchathantra, folk, mythological and Jatak kathas).
You’ll get a chance to evaluate your stories at the Utsav and interact with leading writers, translators, and illustrators across the world!
For more details, rules and regulations please contact Gowri Palachandran at 26868193 or email at bestpractices@katha.org.
India’s little authors do some serious writing
Source: Deccan Herald
No wishy-washy fairytales, toy lands or flippant fiction for them. Rather, the school going segment of Indian authors like to dabble in more serious themes like the environment and the art of spelling well.
Meet Ishita Gulati, a student of Gurgaon-based Scottish High International, Krittika Sridharan of New Delhi-based Sanskriti School and Vinamre Chaudhury of Apeejay School in Faridabad, the winners of 2008 Scholastic Writing Awards.
These three believe that writing skills can be honed with “voracious reading and originality of thought without external efforts”.
Their essays and short stories will feature in a unique anthology, “For Kids by Kids”, published by Scholastic India Pvt. Ltd for school-going readers. The volume was launched here by the bookstore Crossword over the weekend.
Man Asian Long List
Source: Deccan Herald
The longlist for the second Man Asian literary prize has been announced, and features an unexpectedly strong showing from Filipino writers.
The list, which is chosen from submissions received from all over Asia, comprises 21 works of Asian fiction yet to be published in English from both well established and first-time authors.
Four of the contenders for the $10,000 prize hail from the Philippines. Of these, Alfred A Yuson is by far the most experienced, with 22 books, as well as poetry and essay collections to his name. His nominated novel The Music Child tells of an American journalist who undergoes strange experiences in a southern island in the Philippines.
The three other writers from the Philippines in the running are Ian Rosales Casocot with Sugar Land; Miguel Syjuco with Ilustrado; and Lakambini A Sitoy, nominated for Sweet Haven.
Longlist in full
Melting Love—Tulsi Badrinath
Ugly Tree— Hans Billimoria
Sugar Land — Ian Rosales Casocot
Banished! — Han Dong
Neti, Neti— Anjum Hasan
The To-Let House—Daisy Hasan
The Afghan Girl— Abdullah Hussein
To the Temple— Tsutomu Igarashi
Something Wicked This Way Comes — Rupa Krishnan
Leave Me Alone, Chengdu— Murong Xuecun
The Story that Must Not be Told— Kavery Nambisan
Love in the Chicken’s Neck— Sumana Roy
On the Edge of Pandemonium—Vaibhav Saini
Midnight Tales— Salma
Lost Flamingoes of Bombay— Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi
Sweet Haven — Lakambini A Sitoy
The Last Pretence— Sarayu Srivatsa
Ilustrado—Miguel Syjuco
My Friend, Sancho— Amit Varma
Brothers — Yu Hua
The Music Child— Alfred A Yuson
New Book Releases and Events
This section reports on new book and journal releases, besides other announcements. Authors and publishers are requested to take advantage of this section and ensure that their new releases are reported here. All it takes is an email to newsletters at dogearsetc dot com.
Book Launched by Pratham
Pratham Books launched their 150th title “Kolhapur to Beijing - Freestyle!”, amidst great excitement and fanfare. The book was released simultaneously by Virdhawal Khade, Olympians Nisha Millet and Hakimuddin Habibulla , Ashok Kamath [Managing Trustee, Pratham Books] and the book’s author Mala Kumar.
In a run up to the launch, Pratham Books had engaged in getting children to wish the swimmer before he proceeded to Beijing. Over 32,000 children and adults sent wishes through post, email, and also posted messages on the Pratham Books website and blog site. A 164 ft (50m) long greeting card carrying these messages was presented to Veer.
New book on South Asian history focuses on people’s past
Source: indiaedunews.net
Dissatisfied with the available social history of India and Pakistan, two teachers of Panjab University here have come up with a new book that aims to highlight “the untouched, humble and obscure corners of the people’s past”.
Popular literature and pre-modern societies in South Asia is a collection of 19 papers, edited and compiled by Surinder Singh and Ishwar Dayal Gaur.
“The available history of South Asia speaks volumes about the elite class of society but there is hardly any association with downtrodden segments. Our aim was to reconstruct the past and to erode the boundaries between different states and countries,” Singh told mediapersons on Tuesday.
“We have given a fresh turn to Punjab’s history and we even went to Pakistan to gain first-hand knowledge and to meet resource people there. Two historians from Pakistan had also come here to assist us in our work,” he said.
There is a significant emphasis on the history of medieval Punjab and ample usage of poetry, folk tales, folk songs and folklore in the book, pointed out Singh.
The research papers included in the book are by historians from India and Pakistan and deal with six themes of state formation, resistance and protest, traditions, gender relations, cultural fusion and social conventions.
“Our themes are derived from the vernacular history of Sindh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Punjab, Western Himalayas, Awadh, Assam, Bengal and Tamil Nadu. Our endeavour is to highlight the untouched, humble and obscure corners of the people’s past,” said Ishwar Dyal Gaur.
The editors have worked for three years to accomplish this task and are targeting research scholars and social scientists to refer this book as a reference book.
New issue of Pratilipi launched
This issue of Pratilipi (www.pratili could have been titled “History and Literature”. It presents the inter-textualities of history and literature in instances where the narrative of history enters a literary text, where a literary text makes history its subject and, also, as a text in which a historian – a novelist in his secret ambition – takes account of these (literary) texts.
This time around, the lead story consists of not one but many pieces: it has Asad Zaidi’s Hindi poem 1857: Samaan ki Talaash along with an English translation and with Rajesh Kumar Sharma’s commentary; it has excerpts from, and the preface to, Chandra Prakash Deval’s long poem in Rajasthani, Jhuravo, based on an incident from the 16th century, long-forgotten by history - in English and Hindi translations; it has the English translation of Kunwar Narain’s story Mughal Saltanat aur Bhishti from the 1970s; and, against the backdrop of these works, it has an essay by the social-historian Sudhir Chandra on the inter-relationships of history and literature.
Book Launch “Kathaurja.com”
Source: delhievents.com
Kathaurja.com
edited by Rajesh Jain
Penguin Books India & Yatra Books
Book will be launched at India Habitat Centre ( IHC ), Lodhi Road, New Delhi on 6th August at 7pm
Blogs and Articles
Blogs and articles commenting on trends and events in the book industry
Fascinating Collage
Source: The Hindu Literary Review
From pulp fiction to little magazines, Bangla literature today is spreading out in diverse directions.
Another remarkable trend in contemporary Bangla literature is the emergence of Dalit writing. While the term “Dalit literature” was coined in the late 1950s and while there has been a strong and very visible Dalit movement in Marathi and Gujarati literatures, Bengal has not traditionally been associated with any such movement. In fact, scholars had largely assumed that there existed no substantial body of Bangla Dalit literature, perhaps because caste-based oppression was not very common in Bengal. It is only a recent article by Manoranjan Byapari in Economic and Political Weekly that has brought the spotlight to focus on a largely ignored and hitherto invisible body of Dalit literature in Bangla. A powerful body of Dalit literature has been building over the last three decades or so in Bangla, one that is very different in terms of its aesthetic sensibilities and political commitment from those of “mainstream” Bangla literature
Lending Voice
Source: Indian Express
Without P. Lal and his Writers Workshop, some of the best Indian writers in English would not have found their voice
In these days of million-dollar book deals and professional agents, what kind of future does small institutions like his have? “The attitude has not changed over the years. No one wants to touch new writers; poets are literary untouchables. But that doesn’t mean that they will not get chances to express themselves. There are plenty of small-time publishing houses like Kali, Stree and Katha which are doing good work,” he says.
And what kind of future does he see for Writers Workshop? “I don’t think it will have a future beyond me,” he says breezily. “Visions shouldn’t be institutionalised. I wouldn’t want Writers Workshop to be institutionalised. I only hope that others take the initiative to bring Indian writing to the forefront,” he says. The Seths in the making will say amen.
For A Life After Death
Source: The Telegraph, Calcutta
Most Indian publishers remain blissfully innocent of copyright laws, which seek to protect the intellectual property rights of authors. All they seem to know, if at all, is that copyright tends to lapse 50 years after the author’s death, after which the book could come into public domain. Any publisher could then legitimately publish it under its own imprint.
But it isn’t as simple as that. For two reasons. First, copyright could be extended by the author’s assigns, or the text could be revised for another lease of life. Second, print technology and the internet have changed the rules of the game.
You can read the whole article here
Banana Republic Of Indian Letters
Source: Tehelka.com
Books deals used to be gold dust. Now they abound. Entertainment is the day’s priority and publishers make no bones about abandoning taste for profits. Read the Tehelka report
If you want to remember the smells of your childhood, or the mythical powers of the sweet tea served up in your college canteen and are possessed of even the most slender desire to write a book, take heart. Most of your ilk probably has one book contract in their back pocket and another inside their sock. Or so it seems. The number of books published in India every year has expanded, padding bottom lines and in real terms growing the industry at an estimated 25 percent annually. The old days of having a hierarchy of imprints - when the publisher’s name said as much about a book as its blurb — is long gone. A glut of new publishing houses is sprouting authors who have not been incubated, and consequently have not germinated enough. The overriding impression is one of haste.
Kavita Bhanot, formerly with Osian’s literary agency, says, “Everyone is in a rush, there is no emphasis on the craft of writing.” Books are published and consumed, quickly. Genre fiction, including chick-lit, and topical non-fiction (when it is under-produced, under-researched and over-hyped) both falls into the frothy, confectionary consume-ondate- of-purchase brand of fiction. When editors handle 10 titles a year, there is little time to engender excellence.
Not that there is anything wrong with pulp or genre fiction. Ask any publisher, author or general good egg of civil society and you will elicit a shrill defence of the right for chick lit, college lit, every-lit to exist. Ask them how many have read any of Chetan Bhagat’s books and the response is as unequivocal - none. The bumper sticker version of the argument is: democracy means getting what you deserve. What seems skewed is that all work is pitched as literary, even if the build-up and rhetorical signposts are not explicitly so. After all, who could tell that a book billed as representing the new India, a coming-of-age novel about selfdiscovery and a look at post-colonial type love conundrums, is not the descriptor for A House For Mr Biswas but rather for Lilacs Bloom in My Backyard by Meenu Malhotra. It is the packaging that is overblown; considering that genre fiction is thriving, one wonders why it needs to be dressed up in the vestments of its more august counterpart. And then there are the launches — most authors have the conversations, champagne swilling and articulate expositions down pat; they know how to hold court, and they do it with aplomb.
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This newsletter is developed by Queenie Fernandes and Leonard Fernandes with inputs from various individuals, publishing houses, websites and blogs.
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