Please note that registrations are now closed for this batch. To find out about the next batch for this age-group, please fill this form, or follow me on my social media handles – Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Outline Different kinds of poetry Making a story engaging Creating believable characters Working with plot and setting Genre […]
Online Creative Writing Programme (ages 12 to 14)
Please note that registrations are now closed for this batch. To find out about the next batch for this age-group, please fill this form, or follow me on my social media handles – Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. “I’ve written five poems. Will you read them?” “I’ve written three stories. How can I get them published?” […]
Number the Stars
What does it mean to be brave? And how can we help one another to be brave? Number the Stars is a beautiful work of historical fiction set in Denmark during the second world war. I love historical fiction that comes alive to me. Some time ago, I wrote about ten works of middle-grade historical […]
The Chat Box
I love virtual school visits. I enjoy talking to children about my books, encouraging them to explore reading and writing, and taking them through my journey as a writer. Visiting schools virtually was such a novel experience that I wrote an essay for The Curious Reader about it. But of course, as virtual visits go […]
One Crazy Summer
I took a while to get sucked into One Crazy Summer. I was intrigued, yes, both by the setting and by the characters. Yet, I needed more. I wanted to like the characters, which I could not really do–also because you’re not meant to. Delphine, Vonetta and Fern go to Oakland to visit their mother […]
Inside Out and Back Again
When a ten-year-old is forced to leave Saigon and immigrate, what would she go through? After having been one of the smartest students in class back home in Saigon, she is at the bottom of the class in Alabama. What would that be like? Her new classmates can’t understand that her name isn’t Ha, but […]
Nine Days of Spine Poetry
I’ve been fascinated by spine poetry for a while, but I’ve just been too lazy to try it out. A couple of weeks ago, I shed the laziness and began. Like all kinds of writing, I liked some poems more than others. Some of the poems were so unappealing after a couple of days, that […]
5 Times Fictional Friendship Won My Heart
When I was at school, Friendship Day was associated with all kinds of secrecy. We would hide writing boards under our desks, and make friendship bands while pretending to listen to the teacher. Friendship bands would get confiscated, much to our indignation. They came under the category of ‘ornaments’, which were prohibited. Some girls made […]
When Morning Comes
I haven’t read or studied much about South Africa, though I do remember studying about apartheid and Nelson Mandela in school. Yet, when we’re children, it’s easy to think of things as ‘long ago’. Even a year is a long time in a child’s life. Reading When Morning Comes, I realised with quite a shock […]
Flyaway Boy
What an unexpected book! I’ve been meaning to read Flyaway Boy for a while, but technological problems came in the way. I bought a Kindle edition only to learn that the ebook is not compatible with my Kindle, which meant that I had to read it on my laptop. Sitting at my laptop and reading […]
The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling
I met author Wai Chim at the Asian Festival of Children’s Content in 2017. I didn’t just meet her, we were part of the same panel, called Writing About Us. She came for my book launch, a poorly attended event because I knew very few people there in Singapore, and the launch was tucked away […]
The Misfits
The story of how I got my hands on The Misfits is a tale in itself. I ordered it during the Zubaan Women’s Day sale, and it was dispatched about a week later. With the lockdown and then Nisarga, it never came. There was no way to track it and quite honestly, I didn’t try […]
Online Dance Class
Yesterday, at dance class, we broke into spontaneous applause. You know how sometimes, when someone’s internet connection falters during an online class, the layout suddenly changes? And if you’re completely unused to anything technological, what are you supposed to do? Yesterday, our dance teacher Mythili Mami clicked those three vertical dots, found and clicked ‘change […]
The Ammuchi Puchi
I’ve been looking at books from Lantana Publishing for a while, and I want to read so many of them! The books look gorgeous and for the most part, receive glowing reviews too. When I discovered that The Ammuchi Puchi is being offered as a free ebook in times of Corona, I sank my teeth […]
Across the Line
What a powerful, beautiful book. Across the Line is one of the South Asia Book Award Honor Books 2020. I was intrigued by the title and the cover image, but I didn’t know anything about the book, except that it was South Asian, probably Indian. And the name naturally suggested to me the partition. I […]
What to Read on StoryWeaver
At this moment, StoryWeaver has 22,487 stories. 22,487. Let’s do some maths. If I read a story a day every day of my life, I will need over 61 years to read all those stories. That’s not even taking into account the fact that there will be many, many more stories by then. So, here’s […]
Crenshaw
Look at that gorgeous cover. It invited me in with all its charm, its wonder, its mystery. And the book was just as heart-warming. Jackson likes facts. He’s the kid who runs backstage and then reveals to everyone just how the magician pulled a rabbit out of his hat. He knows facts about bats and […]
The Good Thieves
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – you cannot go wrong with Katherine Rundell. The Girl Savage, Rooftoppers, The Wolf Wilder, The Explorer, and now, The Good Thieves. I’ve loved all of them. I love the poetry in the storytelling, the feisty characters and the power of relationships. Katherine Rundell’s work just […]
All of Me
It’s been a while since I wrote a book review, simply because I haven’t been reading much for the last two months. I wrote about that for The Curious Reader – about reading old favourites, but not really taking the plunge and reading something altogether new. Finally, a few days ago, I settled into a […]
Dragonflies, Jigsaws and Seashells – The Story Behind the Story
Stories of rejection can be empowering if they have happy endings. I realised that when I shared the story behind the story of Sisters at New Dawn. I think, since writing is such a solitary affair anyway, knowing that you aren’t amassing those rejections alone makes you feel warm, and a little less alone. So, here’s the story […]