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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. At a time when reading is in decline, a new £50,000 Children's Booker Prize for fiction has been announced which will hopefully spread the joy of words to many young children.
The Booker Prize Foundation said the first edition of the children's award will open for nominations in 2026 to be awarded annually from 2027, celebrating the best contemporary fiction for children aged eight to 12 years old, written in or translated into English and published in the U.K. and/or Ireland. The long-and-shortlist will be selected by a combined panel of child and adult judges.
"The Children's Booker Prize is the most ambitious endeavour we've embarked on in 20 years - and we hope its impact will resonate for decades to come," said Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation.
The U.K.'s Children's Laureate and multi-award-winning children's books author and screenwriter, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, will be the inaugural Chair of judges for the prize. "Stories belong to everyone. Every child deserves the chance to experience the happiness that diving into a great book can bring," said Cottrell-Boyce.
In reviews, we read a collection of stories on Bombay, Alan Gemmel's debut novel on the "coloniser and the colonised", and talk to journalist Harinder Baweja and Bhutanese writer Kunzang Choden.
Books of the week
Harinder Baweja began her journalistic career in the 1980s and has worked through several Prime Ministers from Indira Gandhi to Narendra Modi. In her four-decade stint, she has reported on some of the cataclysmic events that have shaped India as a nation. In an interview about her memoir, 'They Will Shoot You, Madam': My Life Through Conflict (Roli Books), with Manoj Mitta, Baweja explains why mixing religion and politics makes for a heady cocktail but adds dangerous fuel to conflicts. "Conflicts are murky enough; adding electoral strategies to the fold makes conflict murkier." Read the interview here.
The Only City: Bombay in Eighteen Stories (Fourth Estate), edited by Anindita Ghose, brings out the contradictions of the bustling metropolis. Ghose calls the writings "a collection of Bombay moments," in her editor's note. The city has many stories to tell; after all, as Radhika Santhanam writes in her review, it is perhaps the only city in India where we can see Gothic spires and glass skyscrapers - and slums, if we may add -- in the blink of an eye.
It is the only city that never sleeps, yet harbours many dreams, says Santhanam. A stellar cast of writers including Amrita Mahale, Diksha Basu, Ghose herself, Kersi Khambatta, Yogesh Maitreya, Shanta Gokhale, Ranjit Hoskote chronicles their view, with the collection spanning Mumbai from its southern tip all the way to Andheri East. "They revolve around dreamers, hustlers, schemers, and lovers - each bringing out a slice of life in an ever-changing city."
Is it possible that Britain will become a colony of India in the near future? British Member of Parliament and former head of the British Council in India Alan Gemmell explores this daring idea in his debut novel. 30th State (Bloomsbury) is a political thriller inspired by Gemmell's six-year stay in India. In his review, Stanley Carvalho notes that while reverse colonisation forms the narrative arc of the novel, Gemmell examines anxieties about imperial decline, freedom, power, democracy, friends and love, all set against a brilliantly reversed historical backdrop.
Spotlight
Kunzang Choden's 2005 book, Circle of Karma, was the first such novel in English written by a Bhutanese writer. In the decades post the publication of Karma, Choden has built a vast network and helped publish other Bhutanese writers. In an interview with Suhasini Haidar on the sidelines of Bhutan Echoes, Drukyul's annual Literature and Arts Festival in Thimphu, she spoke about her memoir, Telling Me My Stories (Bloomsbury) and how stories helped her through her darkest days. Sent to study at a convent in India, Choden leaned on her childhood memories when she was completely alienated as she spoke no English, Hindi or Nepali and couldn't understand anybody. "I think they [memories] were somehow my tool for survival; these memories helped me to never lose sight of who I was and where I came from."
BrowserThe Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years (Penguin) by historian Sunil Amrith has been named the winner of this year's British Academy Book Prize, a prestigious £25,000 award that celebrates the world's best works of non-fiction. The book maps years of human neglect of the environment and the huge costs of such acts. "The dream of human freedom from nature's constraints is under assault by viruses, burned by wildfires, drowned by floods, scorched by extremes of heat," he writes in the Introduction. Through his masterful study, he examines how the earth has reached such a state of crisis. The Brahmaputra rises in Tibet, travels through three countries and, after travelling over 2,900 kilometres, flows into the Bay of Bengal. Veteran journalist and writer Sanjoy Hazarika journeys down the river in River Traveller: Journeys on the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra from Tibet to the Bay of Bengal (Speaking Tiger Books) and writes a historical and social account. In her column this month, One For The Road, Swati Daftuar picks thrillers, historical pageturners and a highland romance as the season is turning. Among her picks are Freida McFadden's The Intruder (Penguin), the story about a young woman riding out a storm in a remote cabin before she is joined by a stranger, a runaway with a past. The Struggle (Speaking Tiger Books) by Showkat Ali is set in a remote village in the Dinajpur region of Bengal on the eve of Independence/Partition. Translated by V. Ramaswamy and Mohiuddin Jahangir, it tells the story of Phulmoti, a young widow, and Qutubali, ah outsider whose kindness makes him her unlikely ally amid social and political upheavals. When the 'tebhaga' struggle breaks out in Bengal with sharecroppers demanding two-thirds of the harvest from landlords as their due, Phulmoti and Qutubali's life begins to unravel. It was first published in 1989 as Narai.