shyamala's world

US based  author, Shruthi Rao, is out with a nonfiction book for children. Published by  Talking Cub, 20 Indians Who Changed The World is a  collection of  Indian personalities who made a difference in this world.                                                    How did this project come about? Sudeshna Shome Ghosh, editor at Talking Cub, asked me to write it. How long did you take to write the book? About a year, including zeroing in on the personalities, research, writing and editing. What was the biggest challenge in writing this book? Was it easy to find offline research materials in US? The biggest challenge – too much information, too little information, diffused information, conflicting information. To collate it all into one structured write up was very, very hard. Offline research material wasn’t difficu...

Primary Platypus of Duckbill books, Sayoni Basu was a part of Kahani Takbak’s first anniversary celebrations. The following is a transcript from her live chat titled  What publishers look for in kids’ fiction?  The following questions were asked by participants of the live chat: If I write something on a topic that's 'current', will it still make sense for it to be made into a book that could be read next year or even some years later... I think it depends on your writing. No topic every totally disappears from public consciousness, and in fact one of the important ways in which a book differs from a magazine piece is that it needs to bring some additional angles to the story, or different points of view. Like poetry, it is often after an emotion has been reflected on in tranquillity that something of lasting value can emerge. If one were to write a coming of age book set in the 90s do you think it would resonate with digital natives today? Yes, I ...