Penguin India
Hamish Hamilton Debuts in India
The Hamish Hamilton imprint, known for its fine literary fiction and nonfiction, was launched in India in July 2009 with the publication of a new collection of political essays, Listening to Grasshoppers, by India's most celebrated opinion-maker Arundhati Roy, and with an outstanding debut novel about Pakistan in the nineties, The Wish Maker by Ali Sethi. The incandescent The Confession of Sultana Daaku, a novel by Sujit Saraf, published in November, was the third title under the Hamish Hamilton imprint. Upamanyu Chatterjee, Jonathan Safran Foer, Omair Ahmad, Tahmima Anam and Amitav Ghosh will have novels published by Hamish Hamilton in 2010-11 and Vikram Seth's new novel A Suitable Girl will be published in Hamish Hamilton in 2013.
DK's Concise Atlas of the World Sells 300,000 Copies
The incredible success of DK's Concise Atlas of the World has us all smiling. With over 223,000 copies sold in India through October and with orders for another 100,000 copies, we fully expect to sell 300,000 copies in 2009 — a brilliant way to finish the year.
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh Wins at the Vodafone Crossword Awards and the Indiaplaza Golden Quill Awards
Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies was the joint winner for Best Work in English Fiction at the Vodafone Crossword Award 2008. T'ta Professor by Manohar Shyam Joshi (translated by Ira Pande) was the winner in the Indian Language Fiction Translation category of the awards. Commenting on the awards, Publisher and Editor-in-chief of Penguin India Ravi Singh said, "We're delighted and very, very happy indeed that two of our best fiction titles of recent years have won the Crossword Book Award. It's a tribute to the storytelling genius of Amitav Ghosh and Manohar Shyam Joshi, and to Ira Pande's genius as a translator. For all of us at Penguin, it is also a special thrill to win the prestigious award three years running for English-language fiction and the second year running for translation."
Sea of Poppies worked its magic once again at the Indiaplaza Golden Quill awards where it bagged the Readers' Choice Award for Fiction, decided by an online poll, and the Jury Award for Best Book. Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India, also published by Penguin won the Readers' Choice Award for Non Fiction. The Indiaplaza Golden Quill Awards, which were started last year, are organized by the country's largest online bookstore, and reward the best fiction and non-fiction writing of the year by an Indian author.
Allen Lane India Celebrates First Anniversary
The Allen Lane imprint was launched in India in November 2008 with the publication of Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India. Since its launch, the imprint has gone from strength to strength with each Allen Lane title being a bestseller, from Imagining India (55,000 copies) to A Better India: A Better World by N.R. Narayana Murthy (40,000 copies, published April 2009) to The Difficulty of Being Good by Gurcharan Das, (18,000 copies, published September 2009). Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice, published in India in July, has also notched over 20,000 copies in sales. In the coming months, Lord Meghnad Desai's The Rediscovery of India and Pavan K. Varma's Becoming Indian: India's Unfinished Revolution will also be published in the Allen Lane list.
Puffin India's The Feluda Mysteries Bring Feluda Alive in Comic Book Format
Satyajit Ray's evergreen adventure stories of the professional detective Feluda enjoyed renewed attention and interest with Puffin India's The Feluda Mysteries Comic Book Series. The series enjoys many firsts: it is the first time Puffin India has launched a comic-book series, it is the first time the iconic character of Feluda has been available in the comic book format and it is the first time a major publisher in India has published such comics. Illustrated by the renowned artist Tapas Guha and scripted by Subhadra Sen Gupta, the first two titles in the series, A Bagful of Mystery and Beware in the Graveyard, were published in July 2009 and have sold over 12,600 copies each. By mid-2010 there will be six titles in the series.