I’m beginning to write this post on a day when I received a miserable royalty report for one of my books for the year 2019-20. Yet, the year 2020 has been all kinds of wonderful in terms of publishing for me. So many of my projects have seen light of day, though they have suffered for it too, thanks to the pandemic. With ecommerce, distribution and retail taking a blow, perhaps it was not a great year to have books release. But how can I not be happy to see my work out there?
Poetry
Creatures of the Dark
Published by Oxford University Press
January 2020 brought me my first publication of the year, and it was a first in many ways. It was the first time I had something published in a textbook, the first time I could download an app and watch an animated video of my poem, and the first time I was published by Oxford University Press.
The screenshot above shows you just part of the poem, which is now in an ICSE English textbook for the fifth standard – complete with questions based on it!
Books
Can you believe that I had not one, not two, not three, but FOUR books published this year? Not just that, I had a whole range of them – one picture book, one chapter book, one collection of short stories and one middle grade book.
Dragonflies, Jigsaws and Seashells
Published by Scholastic India
Adding Dragonflies, Jigsaws and Seashells to my list of publications in 2020 feels a little like cheating because the first edition was published by Scholastic Asia in 2018. This collection of short stories was shortlisted for the Scholastic Asian Book Award in 2016, published two years later by Scholastic Asia, and shortlisted for the Singapore Book Award in 2019. It was, however, only in March 2020 that it was released in India – just in time for a nationwide lockdown. Oh, well. I’m delighted, nonetheless.
I particularly love the cover Kamala Nair made for the Scholastic India edition; it’s so much more attractive than the first edition!
How I Feel
Published by Pratham Books' StoryWeaver
Yes, I know you can’t read the covers I’ve put in there, but this is the joy of StoryWeaver. My story was published in English In March 2020 and look how far it has come! It’s been translated into nine languages, and in English alone, it has been read over 2,400 times!
A friend of mine wrote to me about how her son read it as part of their library period in school.
My sister translated it into French and since we were together during the lockdown, we did a video where we read out the book together – a bilingual reading.
Psst! It’s going to be out in print soon!
And, yes, I have another set of firsts when it comes to this book – it’s my first book in rhyme, and my first book to be commissioned by Pratham Books (as opposed to Today, I Am and What Will Happen?, which I pitched to them).
Sisters at New Dawn
Published by Zubaan Books
This book is very dear to me for many, many reasons. For one, as a reader, well-written middle grade books are my favourite. I love reading books that make me laugh and cry and with Sisters at New Dawn, I do try to do both.
Additionally, I think that the bond between sisters is wonderful, and, in so many ways, the characters in this book are a combination of my sister Nisha and me. The book is dedicated to my sister too!
I loved the journey that this book took. It took far longer than I would have liked, but in many ways, I felt that the journey was worth it because of how the story evolved in the time that I worked on it. While the setting and characters were well established in my mind already, working with my editor Ishani on the book helped the plot become tighter, less predictable and much truer to what I wanted from the story.
This is one of the books that’s suffered most thanks to the pandemic, though. As the Zubaan office has been shut since March, distribution has been affected and most bookstores haven’t managed to get copies of the book yet. I do hope that changes soon, but until then, the ebook is available both on the Kindle store and at the Zubaan store.
Edit: Sisters at New Dawn is back on shelves! You can get either the paperback or the ebook at the Zubaan store.
The Clockwala's Clues
Published by Duckbill Books (an imprint of Penguin Random House)
I love writing chapter books! I seem to have taken rather a long time to realise that, though, because this is my very first. (There’s at least one more in the pipeline, though, which is tremendously exciting!)
The Clockwala’s Clues is my kind of story in many ways. For one, it’s about a pair of friends who solve puzzles together. For another, it’s set in Pune, the city in which I grew up.
I also love Duckbill’s hOle books, so I’m thrilled to have a book as part of this series. A book about clocks with a hole in it – you can imagine everything the illustrator can do to make that fun! And Suvidha Mistry has used the hOle in all kinds of innovative ways. This book is hot off the press, less than a month old, and readers have already started saying lovely things about it!
Articles
Writing articles for The Curious Reader was so much fun! It’s such a shame they closed down because I enjoyed writing each one. I wrote one listicle, one feature and two personal essays about reading. I’m thankful that the site is still up, and you can still read the work they published!
Here are the featured images of the four articles. Click on the pictures to read the stories.
Writing itself was a little slow in 2020, though, mainly because it was easy to get dispirited. Publishers wrote to me saying they weren’t considering anything new until they had a little more clarity about the situation, and so I still have a lot of unpublished work that publishers asked me to resend in 2021. Let’s see what this year brings me!
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