Penguin India
Penguin India Sweeps the Indiaplaza Golden Quill Awards
Penguin India has performed an astounding clean sweep at the Indiaplaza Golden Quill Awards, with two of their biggest bestsellers winning the awards in all three categories. The Readers' Choice Awards, decided by an online poll, went to Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies for Fiction and to Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India for Nonfiction. Sea of Poppies also bagged the Jury Award for Best Book.
The Indiaplaza Golden Quill Awards, which were started in 2008, are organized by the country's largest online bookstore, and reward the best fiction and nonfiction writing of the year by an Indian author. The Indiaplaza Awards also involve readers in the final choice of the winners. The 2009 awards were for the best writing of 2008.
Penguin won the Jury Award for Brinda Charry's Naked in the Wind at the inaugural Indiaplaza Golden Quill Awards last year.
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh and T'ta Professor by Manohar Shyam Joshi; translated by Ira Pande are winners at the Vodafone Crossword Awards 2008
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh is the joint winner for Best Work in English Fiction and T'ta Professor by Manohar Shyam Joshi (translated by Ira Pande) is the winner in the Indian Language Fiction Translation category of the Vodafone Crossword Award 2008.
The judges for the fiction award, Mukund Padmanabhan, Usha K.R. and Rukmini Bhaya Nair, said in praise of Sea of Poppies: '[This is] a work realized with the confidence of an author at the height of his powers ... Sea of Poppies brings characters and situations alive in a story that is at once hugely entertaining and narrated with an elegant restraint, illustrating how grand narrative can be combined with a youthful sense of adventure.'
Penguin India swept the Vodafone Crossword Awards last year, with Usha K.R's A Girl and a River winning for Fiction, William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal for Non-fiction, and Sankar's Chowringhee and Anand's Govardhan's Travels named joint winners for the Indian Language Fiction Translation award.
B D Garga's From Raj to Swaraj: The Non-Fiction Film in India Wins National Award
It's pouring awards for Penguin India — and this time, it's the National Award. B D Garga's From Raj to Swaraj: The Non-Fiction Film in India has won the Swarn Kamal for Best Book on Cinema. The Swarn Kamal (Golden Lotus) award is shared between the publisher and the author.
This is the latest feat in Penguin's incredible performance at the National Awards: last year, Jerry Pinto's Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb won the Best Book on Film award for 2006, while Roopa Swaminathan's Star Dust: Vignettes from the Fringes of the Film Industr y won the award for 2004. Past winners of the National Award published by Penguin also include Gayatri Chatterjee's Awara and Anupama Chopra's Sholay.
The National Award for the Best Book on Film is the highest recognition for this genre of writing in the country and Penguin India is delighted to be honoured repeatedly for its publications on film.
Over 700 Participants at the Puffin Quiz 2009
The Puffin Quiz 2009 with quizmaster Derek O'Brien was a grand success for both Penguin and Puffin. The quiz started early at 8.30 in the morning with over 700 starry-eyed and intensely competitive quizzers waiting impatiently for their turn to register and make it through the towering steel gates of Siri Fort Auditorium. Ruskin Bond, India's most
beloved author, made a quiet entry inside the hall but was surrounded by
fans clamouring for his autograph. Once all the students were seated the
preliminary round of the quiz began. Over 50 schools participated in the
quiz although only six teams made it into the final round. The
infectious enthusiasm of the students, the presence of star-quizmaster
Derek O Brien and author Ruskin Bond created an unforgettable event. The
fabulous prizes (Laptops for the 1st prize, Xboxes for the 2nd prize
and Ipods for the 3rd prize) were the icing on the cake.
The Sequel to Vikram Seth's A Suitable Girl Coming from Penguin in 2013
In a move which will cheer his fans, Vikram Seth, among the most widely admired writers in the world, has announced that he is writing the long-awaited sequel to his much-loved million-copy bestseller A Suitable Boy. A Suitable Girl will be published by Penguin in Autumn 2013.
2013 marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of A Suitable Boy, which was a worldwide sensation. The 1,350 page book sold over a quarter of a million copies in hardback and over a million copies in paperback. In the intervening years, Penguin will also publish a new volume of Vikram Seth's poems and a new book of essays.
After announcing the new book, Vikram Seth said, "In India, all my books have for years been published by Penguin. But I am very happy today to be joining foreign colonies of the Flightless One. They have already made me feel very welcome, and I hope in time to hatch many suitable eggs with them.'
The sequel to A Suitable Girl will also be published by Penguin in the UK and Canada.
The Biography of Oscar-winning Music Director A.R. Rahman Takes Readers Inside His "Musical Storm"
The Penguin India biography of the Academy Award-winning Music Director A.R. Rahman is proving to be immensely popular. An international celebrity today, Rahman is being called 'the Mozart of the East' for his award-winning score for Slumdog Millionaire. In India, however, Rahman has been an iconic superstar for seventeen years, ever since his first film Roja. Many claim to know the man behind the music but Rahman shies away from the public eye. He is fiercely protective of his privacy, and prefers to be known only through his music. A.R. Rahman: The Musical Storm also takes readers straight into Rahman's inimitable world: the composing and recording sessions that run through the night; his compulsive need to 'get it right,' which can cause directors to wait months for a song; his continuing fascination with electronic equipment; his relationship with his mother, his inspiration; and above all his religiosity, which is at the root of his being and his music.
Hamish Hamilton Launches in India
The Hamish Hamilton imprint, known for its fine literary fiction and nonfiction, launched in India in July 2009 with the publication of Arundhati Roy's Listening to Grasshoppers: Fieldnotes on Democracy and Ali Sethi's The Wish Maker. Sultana Daaku, a novel by Sujit Saraf and Upamanyu Chatterjee's forthcoming novel Way To Go are some of the other major titles that will be published under this imprint in the next year.