Kate Greenaway Medal for illustrator Sydney Smith

(London, Jun 27, 2018) Sydney Smith, the illustrator of Joanne Schwartz’s picture book Town Is By The Sea has won this year’s Kate Greenaway Medal, the UK’s oldest award for illustration.

Town Is By The Sea, which depicts a day in the life of a boy growing up in a coal mining town in the 1950s, contrasts a child’s life of play with that of the adult world of work, with the bright world above ground juxtaposed with the perilous subterranean world of a mining pit.

Smith, who hails from Canada, visited a miner’s museum in Cape Breton’s Glace Bay, where the story is set, and took inspiration for his expressive brush work from Impressionist artists such as J M W Turner.

British writer Geraldine McCaughrean won the CILIP Carnegie Medal for the second time with her middle-grade novel Where the World Ends.

Smith and McCaughrean each received 500 pounds worth of books to donate to a library of their choice, a specifically commissioned golden medal and a 5,000 pounds cash prize from the Colin Mears Award.

According to Jake Hope, chair of the judging panel, “Sydney Smith’s Town Is By The Sea skillfully balances an intimate story of a child’s world of play and wonder alongside a bigger story of a whole community and culture built around mining. Its illustrations are impressive and expansive in scope and beautifully evoke both time and place.”

Smith said although the story is specific to a place and a time, the context of childhood is universal.

“There is something so beautiful about the universality of the complicated richness of youth. It is a dream come true to see my work, crafted from my heart, for family and my home to be honoured by the highest of praises,” he said.

Town Is by the Sea is published by Walker books UK and in India by Penguin. Smith has illustrated multiple children’s books, including The White Cat and the Monk, written by Jo Ellen Bogart, and the highly acclaimed Footpath Flowers.

New book sheds light on India’s freedom struggle

(New Delhi, Jun 26, 2018) Screenwriter Supriya Kelkar sheds light on the Indian freedom movement in her debut novel which is inspired by her great-grandmother’s experience working with Mahatma Gandhi.

“Ahimsa” will be published in India in August.

In 1942, after Gandhi asked one member of each family to join the non-violent freedom movement, 10-year-old Anjali was devastated to think that her father will risk his life for the country. But he’s not the one joining. Anjali’s mother was.

As the family got more and more involved in the cause, Anjali gives up her privileges and confronts her prejudices to ensure her little contribution to the movement is complete.

“Ahimsa”, published by Scholastic India, is essentially about female empowerment and overcoming one’s internal struggles and giving up one’s biases.

Kelkar, a screenwriter who has worked on the writing teams for films like “Lage Raho Munnabhai” and “Eklavya: The Royal Guard”, doesn’t shy away from the reality that progress can sometimes be slow and one must persist even when all hope seems gone.

“I’m so thrilled Ahimsa is heading to India, and cannot wait to share this book with all the wonderful readers,” US-based Kelkar said.

According to Shantanu Duttagupta, head of publishing at Scholastic India, “Ahimsa” is a “book every Indian should read, whether you are a parent, child, educator or book lover. It leaves a mark”.

‘Man with the White Beard’: Of violence and nightmares

(New Delhi, Jun 24, 2018) Nightmares left Gurmeet Singh aka Goldy like a restless soul trapped inside a listless body since he was five years old.

Two men and two women come uninvited and unannounced to his thoughts, night after night. The four faces remain nondescript, but their actions definitive, like professional actors working on cue.

The four live happily somewhere deep in Goldie’s head, like a snake camouflaged among leaves scattered on a forest floor, ignoring till it chose to, but ready to bite when it wanted.

A new book “Man with the White Beard” revolves around the lives of Goldy and his parents Balwant Singh and Kulwanti and how they deal with the nightmares of the young boy.

Balwant Singh is a prominent face of the Raja Garden auto market and he is aware of his important position, a position that inched him closer to those who mattered within the Akali Dal in Delhi.

The man with the white beard is one of those who came in Goldy’s dreams. He had muscular, hairy forearms, and wore a black leather watch on his left wrist. He looked stern, and even as he smiled, his big lips with the white beard showed no movement.

Truth is like a nervous pedestrian undecided on whether to cross a busy street or wait for an opportune moment.

“Man with the White Beard”, written by Shah Alam Khan, a professor of orthopaedics at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, and brought out by LiFi Publications, is the story of that nervous truth which evades Kulwanti and Goldy.

The book also talks of the times during the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the Gujarat riots of 2002 and the Kandhamal violence in Odisha in 2007.

Tabish Khair ‘returns’ to India with new novel

Zafri Mudasser Nofil

(New Delhi, Jun 24, 2018) Author Tabish Khair, whose last two novels were set outside India, returns home with his new book which is about a man who builds his thriving business empire with the help of his trusted aide only to be compelled to find out more about him after an incident.

“Night of Happiness” is described by the Denmark-based Khair as either a ghost story or a psychological thriller or both about a man who has experienced something most of us cannot even imagine.

“How this man (Ahmed) lives a seemingly normal life with or despite this experience. And how someone like us – well-meaning, reasonable and limited (the narrator of the novel, who is a businessman named Anil Mehrotra) – reacts when exposed to the trauma of Ahmed’s tragic experience,” he says of his book, published by Picador India.

Pragmatic entrepreneur Anil Mehrotra has set up his thriving business empire with the help of his lieutenant, Ahmed, an older man who is different in more ways than one. Quiet and undemanding, Ahmed talks in aphorisms, bothers no one, and always gets the job done. But when one stormy night, Mehrotra discovers an aspect to Ahmed that defies all reason, he is forced to find out more about his trusted aide.

As layers and layers of Ahmed’s history are peeled off, Mehrotra finds himself confronting some deeply unsettling questions. Does Ahmed really have a wife? Does he keep her imprisoned in their flat? Is Ahmed deranged, or is he just making desperate sense of the horrors that afflicted him in the past?

“I have always been interested in narrating how people connect and fail to connect. This is a novel that takes the exploration in another direction: what happens when someone you think you know turns out to be different from what you had expected? How do we cope with the fact that other people are always different from us, that the other always exceeds the totalising comprehension of the self?” Khair told PTI.

He says that the book’s narrator becomes a kind of Coleridgean Ancient Mariner.

“Mehrotra, the fictitious narrator – who was once a widely read man before concentrating on making money – is very aware of that too, as he discovers Ahmed’s secrets, without totally understanding them.

“He slowly realises that like the ancient mariner he is talking about an obsessive and incomprehensible experience, and I hope that the reader realises by the end of the novel that both the texts are about human suffering, guilt, empathy (or its lack), and the search for redemption.”

Khair has chosen an important Islamic festival to base his novel upon – Shab-e-baraat. Asked if there was any particular reason, he says, “Shab-e-baraat attracts me as a festival as it has so many indigenous – Indian – elements in it, many of which are now being discarded by Islamic fundamentalists.”

Born and educated in Gaya in Bihar, Khair is the author of various acclaimed works, including novels “The Bus Stopped”, “Filming: A Love Story”, “The Thing About Thugs”, “How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position”, and “Jihadi Jane”; poetry collections “Where Parallel Lines Meet” and “Man of Glass”, and the studies “Babu Fictions and The Gothic”, “Postcolonialism and Otherness”, and “The New Xenophobia”.

He is currently an associate professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, and a Leverhulme guest professor at the School of English, Leeds University, UK.

Asked how different “Night of Happiness” is from his previous works, Khair says, “I try to write a different novel every time: so I hope it is different, but I will let the reader judge. In a simpler sense, I return to India with this novel. My last two novels (before this one) take place outside India, though they feature protagonists with South Asian backgrounds.”

Preti Taneja’s retelling of ‘King Lear’ fetches her UK’s Desmond Elliott Prize

(New Delhi, Jun 24, 2018) Preti Taneja has won the prestigious Desmond Elliott Prize given for the best debut novel in English published in the UK for her retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear set in modern-day India.

Taneja took home the 10,000 pounds prize for novel We That Are Young beating fellow shortlisted authors, Gail Honeyman (Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine) and Paula Cocozza (How to Be Human).

We That Are Young explores themes of King Lear like severed relationships and warring families against the backdrop of the 2011 anti-corruption riots in India.

It follows a central cast of characters as they react to ageing patriarch Devraj’s decision to pass control of ‘the Company’ to his three daughters, Gargi, Radha and Sita.

From Delhi mansions to luxury hotels, from city slums to the streets of Kashmir, from palace to wayside, Taneja recasts an old tale in fresh, eviscerating prose that bursts with energy and fierce, beautifully measured rage.

The novel was chosen by a judging panel chaired by author Sarah Perry and having award-winning broadcaster Samira Ahmed and Waterstones’ head of fiction and publisher liaison Chris White as its other members.

Perry said the jury members were “absolutely unanimous in our love and admiration for this novel, whose scope, ambition, skill and wisdom was, quite simply, awe-inspiring”.

Chairman of the Prize’s Trustees, Dallas Manderson, said We That Are Young is exactly the kind of novel that the Desmond Elliott Prize exists to discover and promote.

“This extraordinarily accomplished debut has flown somewhat under the radar thus far, not having received the attention and widespread acclaim that it so rightly deserves. Our hope is that winning the Prize will help guarantee Preti’s long-term future as an author, as we’re sure it will be bright,” he said.

We That Are Young was published by Penguin Random House India under Hamish Hamilton in October 2017.

“Penguin Random House India publishes the classic writers I grew up reading, the nonfiction I drew on while I was writing my book, and the most brilliant, avant-garde fiction of today. We That Are Young has found its home: I could not be more delighted,” said Taneja.

“In We That Are Young, Preti Taneja’s words leap off the page, constantly juggling family dynamics, workplace power struggles and India’s grand economic and political transition, bringing them all into a singular, compelling narrative,” said Meru Gokhale, Editor-in-Chief (Literary Publishing) at Penguin Random House India.

Before trying her hand at fiction writing, Taneja was a human rights correspondent and reported on Iraq and in Jordan, Rwanda, and Kosovo. She was born in the UK to Indian parents.

The Desmond Elliott Prize is given to a debut novel from any genre, published between April 1 of a year and March 31 of the next year in the name of acclaimed publisher and literary agent Desmond Elliott.

Yoga more than twisting like pretzel: Book

(New Delhi, Jun 21, 2018) Yoga is not simply about twisting into different positions like a pretzel or sitting cross-legged on a mat with eyes closed but something that brings consciousness and sensitivity to one’s relationship with physical, mental, emotional and spiritual states, says a new book.

In “Yoga Shakti: Awaken Your Own Power”, Manasa yoga exponent Shailaja Menon explores the physical benefits of practising yoga and also the spiritual and mental fulfilment one gains from it.

Menon uses personal experience to explain the origins of Manasa yoga and recommends daily exercises to help introduce beginners to the world of yoga.

She also discusses how negative feelings like anger, depression and anxiety can lead one to lose the power over his or her life and explores how yoga can help regain this power and achieve self-realisation.

“Yoga is a state of mind and is not limited to a shape we create with the body,” she says.

According to Menon, balancing poses are especially challenging as they demand deep attention and also strengthen the foundation one stands on.

“From a yogic perspective, the state of our bodies and the state of our lives are interconnected. Thus, balance in the body is the foundation for balance in life,” she says.

Menon feels years of yoga practice bring consciousness and sensitivity to “our relationship with ourselves – our physical, mention, emotional and spiritual states, and to our relationship with the world around us”.

The book, published by Niyogi, has a foreword by diplomat-turned-politician Shashi Tharoor.

“Although yoga has seen unprecedented diffusion into popular culture, awareness of its spiritual benefits is often diluted through its contemporary commercialisation and politicisation. The costs of such distortion are high: as we witness societies fracture across differences and individuals fall victim to new stresses, the need to understand and practice yoga in its truest form is felt acutely,” he writes.

The fruits of yoga are borne not only from its physical performance, but in the changes that occur beneath the surface to instil habits of compassion and feelings of peace, he says.

Priyanka Chopra to come out with memoir in 2019

(New Delhi, Jun 19, 2018) Actor Priyanka Chopra will come out with her memoir next year in which she will write about things which she has never spoken before.

Unfinished is a collection of personal essays, stories and observations of the actor, producer, activist and UNICEF goodwill ambassador, publishers Penguin Random House India announced tonight.

The book will be published simultaneously in the US by Ballantine Books and in the UK by Michael Joseph.

The UK and Commonwealth (including India) rights were acquired at an auction from Siobhan O’Neill and Fiona Baird, on behalf of Mel Berger, of William Morris Endeavor.

“The flavour of the book will be honest, funny, spirited, bold, and rebellious, just like me,” says Chopra.

“I have always been a private person; I’ve never spoken about my feelings during my journey but I am ready to do so now,” she says about the book.

According to Chopra, she was raised to be fearless when it came to opinions.

“I would like to tell my story in the hope of inspiring people – especially women — to change the conversation, to shatter glass ceilings. Women are always told we can’t have everything. I want everything, and I believe anyone else can have it too. I’m proof of it,” she says.

Chopra forayed into the entertainment industry at the age of 17 when she won Miss India and went on to win Miss World the following year.

Besides acting in several Bollywood movies, Chopra earned acclaim over three seasons as Alex Parrish on ABC’s show Quantico, becoming the first Indian actor to star as the lead of a TV drama series and winning two consecutive People’s Choice Awards for the role.

She also produces global TV and film content under her banner Purple Pebble Pictures.

“At Penguin Random House India, we are committed to publishing strong female role models, and are immensely proud of having Priyanka Chopra on that list,” says Meru Gokhale, Editor-in-Chief (Literary Publishing) at Penguin Random House India.

Senior Commissioning Editor Manasi Subramaniam says Unfinished is not just a memoir but a manifesto for women who believe that they can’t just have it all but that they deserve it all.

“Priyanka is one of the most influential women in the world, and it is not a badge she wears lightly.There’s something about the Priyanka Chopra phenomenon that feels both revolutionary and accessible, and that’s entirely a result of the person that she is,” she says.

Ethnic Chinese cuisine festival in Noida

(Noida, Jun 17, 2018) Want to try ethnic Chinese dishes like Peking duck, Hunan lamb fry or sliced fish?

A luxury hotel here is offering an array of Chinese and pan Asian cuisine as part of its anniversary celebrations.

“We aim to take our guests on a journey to the mainland of China through exquisite dishes and traditional frame-ups,” says Sujeet Singh, executive chef at Radisson Noida.

The hotel has three restaurants – The Creative Kitchen, The Great Kabab Factory and Ni Hao – with the third one mainly catering to Chinese and pan Asian food aficionados.

“Ni Hao is ideal for those seeking flavours of Chinese cuisine along with seafood delicacies,” Singh says, adding the emphasis is on seeking great flavours of the food.

A variety of seafood delicacies is on the menu like marinated squid, stir fried lobster, salt and pepper and bird eye chilli prawn and shrimp and bok choy dumplings.

For the vegetarians, there are dishes such as Som Tam, broccoli with Haricot beans salad, Napa cabbage and walnut dumpling, steamed tofu with rice wine, and eggplant in black pepper sauce.

Radisson Noida, sector 55 is celebrating the property’s first anniversary since its rebranding from Park Plaza, says food and beverage manager Shivankar Kodesia.

“Some specials are steam fish cake with almond, barbecue duck, chimney pot soup, smoked chicken dumpling, Peking duck with pancake and chicken and glass noodles ball,” he says.

India failed to emerge as football power by not quitting Commonwealth: Book

(New Delhi, Jun 17, 2018) Parochialism has been affecting Indian football over the years but things might have been different had India left the Commonwealth in 1950 to join the soccer world full time, a new book claims.

India won the Asian Games football gold in 1951, again in 1962 and came fourth in the Melbourne Olympics in 1956.

“Had soccer grabbed its chance, and Jawaharlal Nehru followed popular sentiment and left the Commonwealth, who is to say that today football, not cricket, would be the main sport of India,” UK-based sports commentator Mihir Bose says.

“Had India left the Commonwealth in 1950, making Indian cricket a world outcast, and the Indian football gone to Brazil to play in the World Cup the same year, that by itself would have made India a football nation like Saudi Arabia which does not see playing in the World Cup an impossible dream,” he argues in his book “Game Changer”.

“Had India gone to the World Cup in 1950, it would have been playing the best of world football. In the 1950s, that was not possible for India in cricket. Matching wits against the best would have been a tremendous boost for the sport,” Bose also told PTI.

“Football then was more popular than cricket, had reached more parts of the country, had links with Indian nationalism in the way cricket did not and playing in the World Cup would have boosted the game,” he adds.

He also says that football in India did not really follow the game as it was played in the rest of the world and has been “wretchedly” led.

“Cricket administrators are bad but football has been worse,” he alleges.

“Game Changer”, published by Palimpsest, is a critical take on the English Premier League and has a special chapter on Indian football titled “First Words”. The foreword is written by veteran football commentator Novy Kapadia.

“The England team may not have been a success but the Premier League is the most successful leagues in the world. It shows how English domestic football has reinvented itself in the last quarter of a century from being a league that was going nowhere and outclassed by La Liga and Serie A,” Bose says about the EPL.

He says Indian clubs need to learn from the sides in the English Premier League on how to market themselves.

“English clubs are very good at reaching out to their fan base and making their club’s name well known and reaching out beyond the football public.”

But to really develop the sport, Indian clubs need to set up academies which can nurture young players, he suggests.

“Also they need to make sure their coaches go out into remote rural areas to seek out young players who could be turned into stars. They also need to develop links with clubs in England and other European countries so their young players can come to Europe to learn about the game. Their coaches should also do the same,” Bose says.

According to him, Indian sports followers do not seem to be interested in the grass roots of the game and their focus seems to be on celebrity sports, and cricket in India has all the celebrities.

“It is not easy for football to compete with cricket. This will have to be a long process,” he says.

“FIFA thinks Indian football is a great underdeveloped story of world football. Indian football has a long, rocky road ahead but it is not an impossible one. They can learn from how the English Premier League reinvented the game,” he hopes.

‘Nai Kahani’ was not started as a movement: Mohan Rakesh

(New Delhi, Jun 14, 2018) The Nai Kahani idea was not started as a movement but it became a sort of a symbol for the efforts of those associated with it to alienate the short story from what it was after Munshi Premchand, according to one of its pioneers Mohan Rakesh.

Rakesh (1925-1972) was one of the brains behind the Nai Kahani (New Short Story) literary movement of Hindi literature in the 1950s, the others being Kamaleshwar and Rajendra Yadav.

The works of Rakesh are now published in a book titled Another Life: Thirteen stories and a play.

Edited by Carlo Cappola and published by HarperCollins India, the book is a compilation with a selection of Rakesh’s fiction (authorised by the author himself), his play Adhe Adhure, and two rare first-person statements which have been among the most sought after critical resources on his work – i.e. the Self-Portrait and a long, in-depth interview with him.

In the interview with the Journal of South Asian Literature, Rakesh says Nai Kahani was not a ‘movement’ which Kamaleshwar, Rajendra Yadav and he started.

“The fact is that in the middle 1950s, there was a group of writers, about 10 or 12, who were primarily interested in writing short stories. All of a sudden, it seemed, there was a shift away from writing poetry to writing short stories.

“At that time, there was a desire to catch the mood of our time. It was this restlessness which led to the shift of emphasis. Nai Kahani became sort of a symbol for our effort to alienate the short story from what it was after Premchand,” he said.

Rakesh wrote the first modern Hindi play, Ashadh Ka Ek Din (1958), and made significant contribution to the forms of the novel, short story, travelogue, criticism, memoirs and drama.

“The New Short Story Movement was not started as a movement. Some of us had been writing, and with this shift of emphasis to interpreting the reality around us, many of us found that we had a great deal in common.

“This name was later given to this writing, not as it was emerging. It then came to be associated with our names, just because at one stage in the development of this type of writing, we became the spokesmen for what was then called a ‘movement’. Because the critics failed to do so, we decided to take over and start defining for ourselves and for others just what we meant by Nai Kahani,” Rakesh said.

The emphasis of the writers was on the emergence of an idea through the reality itself, not driving the idea into some sort of realistic pattern, but discovering the idea inherent in the reality itself.

“This became our distinctive point. The only good thing about this movement is that no writer was writing like any other. Most of the writers had their own individuality in Nai Kahani,” Rakesh told the journal, of which Coppola was the Editor Emeritus, 1963-2002.

More than a decade in the making, and put together in collaboration with the author, Another Life: Thirteen stories and a play makes a broad range of Rakesh’s work available to English readers. The stories here range from humorous, satirical studies of human foibles, to profound, painful commentaries on the complexities of the human condition.

A translation of Adhe Adhure, the play that thrust Indian drama into modernity and one of the finest ever written in Hindi, is included as well.