shyamala's world

  Written and illustrated by  Nancy Raj,  It's My Colour  emerged from a workshop jointly conducted by Tulika Books and Parag Trust in 2018. Published by Tulika books, the picture book is ideal for chidlren of ages 3-8 years. Chennai based Nancy Raj gives more details about the book which marks her debut as an author. Your thoughts about writing and illustrating a book for the first time. While I naturally paid attention to forms, shapes, composition, colour palette and other visual aspects of storytelling, this book gave me the opportunity to imagine and think of words, texts, it’s expressions and narration for the first time. This was a challenging journey but a joyful one.   Also, this  is my first attempt making mystical characters and scenes. Flying lorries, talking tomatoes, carrots as pirates etc. I have always drawn only people and their everyday life in India. (Except once some Indian wildlife for Pratham’s Achoo ) This book has mystical creat...

(This interview is a piece from the November, 2016 issue of Kahani Takbak, a newsletter written by authors for children authors.  To subscribe to the newsletter click here  ) 1.What has prompted Duckbill to start this initiative now? Does the excellent performance by our sport stars in the recent Para Olympics have anything to do with it? At Duckbill, we believe in doing fun books which kids will want to read for pleasure, but we also like it if these books talk about dilemmas or problems that kids face. We believe that literature is one of the primary means through which we learn empathy and how to deal with the challenges that the world holds. So we have books where the themes, for example, of single parenthood, class, sexuality, bullying etc are also present. So, kids with special needs or problems was something else we are interested in. We published two books which feature protagonists with special needs--Zainab Sulaiman's  Simply Nanju-- or some kind...