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Alice Oseman’s “Heartstopper”, Vols 1- 3

Writer, comic artist and illustrator Alice Oseman won her first publishing contract at the age of 17. Since then she has written three young adult novels and converted her popular web comic series, Heartstopper, into a four-book deal with Hachette Children’s Group. The first three volumes of the graphic novels have been published — Volume One, Volume Two, and Volume Three.

Heartstopper is a lovey-dovey story about two high school teenagers who discover that they are in love. Charlie and Nick are eighteen months apart in age. Charlie came out to his family and friends in Grade 9 and faced the horrific consequences of being bullied in school. Nick is the tough, popular, typical footballer-kind of schoolboy, who is in Grade 11. The three volumes are about Nick coming to terms with his love for Charlie. Nick is extremely hesitant and confused as he cannot undertand his attraction for the same sex particularly when he is also attracted to girls. Slowly Nick realises he is bisexual but his love for Charlie is for now firm.

The series move gently. At times it seems far too much time is spent in understanding and coming-to-terms with first love. But the awkwardness and anxiety riddled questions about whether the boys are making the right choices are very well presented. They are from a youngster’s perspective. It is difficult to describe but when adolescents are in love or think they are in love, it is a time-consuming preoccupation for them, usually at the cost of everything else — as Nick discovers when he fails to complete his maths homework,. His excuse? He had been up till late at night texting Charlie!

Heartstopper will fit very well in a YA LGBTQ+ list or section of a library except it is hard to imagine that many school librarians will permit these graphic novels to sit in the general section of their library. While YA LGBTQ+ lists are more and more well-defined with every passing year, their acceptance amongst the reading public will take time. The readers exist in the target audience of adolescents but the gatekeepers are still the adults. While novels of these lists are proliferating, particularly with Scholastic, graphic novels may be more challenging to accept for their explicit illustrations. Heartstopper is filled with innumerable scenes of kissing, hugging, cuddles and stolen moments between Nick and Charlie that may not go down too well with many adults who firmly believe that texts exploring sexuality are not necessarily to be introduced to imressionable minds. Having said that there are many, many reasons as to why these books must be shared, talked about and kept in classroom and institutional libraries. These are conversation starters. More importantly, while LGBTQ+ movements around the world continue gain in strength, younger generations continue to experience the confusion and anxiety that their sexual orientation may cause to them at first. It creates mental anguish that is not easy to share and discuss even with one’s closest family members as unfortunately acceptance of gay love continues to be taboo in many families. This is where books like Heartstopper prove to be useful. It is easy to read in solitude and come across questions that are constantly playing out in one’s mind. There are advantages of reading books as it helps in recognising and relating to scenarios outlines in the stories. LGBTQ+ activists may dismiss these books as being far too simplistic in their approach but the fact is that there are many youngsters who are worried and need to know. They may not be absolutely familiar with sophisticated arguments of the LGBTQ+ movement. It is important to start with the basics and slowly guide adolescents to a level of understanding and comfort that their anxiety about their sexual orientation is misplaced. As regards social acceptance, there are challenges but these too can be addressed slowly and steadily.

Heartstopper may not be to everyone’s liking but it is worth reading and discussing.

4 October 2020

On readership by Philip Pullman

27 02 , 2018 No Comments

Daemon Voices by Philip Pullman is a selection of his essays and speeches delivered during the course of his career. There is a lot of wisdom buried amongst these pages. A book to dip into and think about. For instance the following extract is from his essay “Intention” discussing the author’s intention on when he embarks upon writing a book. A question he says that is usually reserved for authors at literary festivals where the audiences need to be entertained. He illustrates the problematic nature of such a question by extending the argument to that of labelling books with an age figure.

The final aspect of ‘intention’ I shall look at here is to do with audience. ‘What age of reader is this book written for?’ is a question that different authors feel differently about. Some are quite happy to say, ‘It’s for sixth and seventh graders’, or, ‘It’s for thirteen and upwards.’ Others are decidedly not. In 2008 most publishers of children’s books in teh UK announced that in an attempt to increase sales they were going to put an age-figure on the cover of every book, of the form 5+, 7+, 9+, and so on, to help adult purchasers in non-specialist bookstores decide whether a particular book would make a suitable present for a particular child. They met a passionate and determined resistance from many authors, who felt that their efforts to write books that would welcome readers of a wide age-range were being undermined by their own publishers, and that the age-figure would actively discourage many children from reading books they might otherwise enjoy. The argument continues, but again it shows the problematic nature of ‘intention’. Does age-guidance of any sort imply that the book is intended for a particular kind of a reader? My own view is that the only appropriate verb to use is, again, hope rather than intend. We have no right to expect any audience at all; the idea of sorting our readers out before they’ve seen the first sentence to me presumptious in the extreme.

I too have my reservations about this given that this principle is increasingly being turned on its head by bracketing the child’s reading to what is deemed as “age appropriate” rather than allowing them a free run of book collections whether at the school library or at bookshops/ bookfairs. Off late this basic principle is being turned on its head by adults discouraging children to pick up a book that has been labelled in this manner as not being age appropriate. Horrific turn of events given that this was not the intention at all. Age-guidance numbers were merely that — guiding principles. These numbers are not meant to bracket the child’s reading and thereby curtail their enthusiasm in reading. Children ( like adults) test themselves constantly and evolve in their reading habits by flitting between easy and challenging books. Whereas emprical evidence as collected in the bi-annual Scholastic Kids and Family Reading Reports ( KFRR) show that if children are allowed to pick up books for themselves there are greater chances of them becoming lifelong readers. ( These reports have been published across continents including India after conducting surveys in various cities, tier 2, and tier 3 towns too.) So it is not a good idea to prevent children from accessing books. If they do not understand something they will ask or drop it and return to the book later. But don’t straitjacket their reading in this manner. Philip Pullman is absolutely correct in expressing his reservations about the intention of publishers on printing age-guidance numbers on the back cover of children’s literature.

Philip Pullman Daemon Voices ( ed. Simon Mason) David Fickling Books, Oxford, 2017. Hb. pp. £20

27 February 2018

Julia Donaldson in India, Interaction with educators, New Delhi ( 19 January 2018)

19 01 , 2018 No Comments

Scholastic India organised a FABULOUS interaction led by Julia Donaldson’s with educators, teachers and librarians at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. It was a technically perfect masterclass on how storytelling and picturebooks can be employed imaginatively in classrooms, with minimal or NO props, involving all the children, with a little bit of rhythm, song and dance, opening a world of possibilities!

Neeraj Jain, MD, Scholastic India standing in front of a display of Julia Donaldson’s books

Julia Donaldson spoke of her journey from a musician/songwriter making an unexpected foracy in to the world of books and how very fortuitous it turned out. She spoke of her collaboration with Axel Scheffler and other illustrators. She performed some of her better known stories such as Gruffalo transforming the room of schoolteachers into little children as they sang along with her! She was accompanied on the guitar by her husband Malcolm and a supporting cast that included her publishers from UK and India.

A magical morning!

19 January 2018

Joshua Hammer’s The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

11 07 , 2017 No Comments

( My review of Joshua Hammer’s The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu was published on Bookwitty on 10 July 2017. I have c&p the text below. )

A rich literary tradition once flourished in Timbuktu, a crossroads where for centuries the imams as well as the general population were receptive to ideas that passed through the city. Visiting scholars brought religious as well as secular volumes, and an industry grew up around the copying, transliteration and translation of a wide range of texts.

Wealthy patrons kept manuscripts in family collections, bequeathing them to subsequent generations. In the twenty-first century, families still have trunks filled with these books. At seventeen years old, Abdel Kader Haidara inherited an extensive library from his father, Mohammed “Mamma” Haidara. It consisted of gems such as “a treatise about Islamic jurisprudence from the early twelfth century; a thirteenth-century Koran written on vellum made from the hide of an antelope; another holy book from the twelfth century, no larger than the palm of a hand, inscribed on a fish skin, its intricate Maghrebi script illuminated with droplets of gold leaf.”

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is journalist Joshua Hammer’s detailed account of Abdel Kader Haidara’s achievement in amassing and protecting an extraordinary library of these manuscripts. In the 1980s, Haidara undertook expeditions, sometimes by boat or camel, far and wide across Northern Africa to persuade families part with their heirlooms.

Haidara curated the collection with care: “He was particularly interested in manuscripts that contradicted Western stereotypes of Islam as a religion of intolerance – pointing with pride to Ahmeda Baba’s denunciations of slavery, and to the strident correspondence between the jihadi sultan of Massina and Sheikh Ahmed Al Bakkay Al Kounti, a mid-nineteenth-century Islamic scholar in Timbuktu known for his moderation and acceptance of Jews and Christians. As time passed he became something of a scholar himself, revered by many peers in Timbuktu for his knowledge of the region’s history and religion, sought after by parents to offer their children guidance.”

Polite and discreet, Haidara was a deft negotiator in multiple languages. In return for the manuscripts, Haidara compensated the families handsomely, be that in currency or with livestock, grains or camels—or once, with a commitment to build a mosque and school. Meanwhile, funding poured in from a long list of sources as diverse as the Ford Foundation, the Princess of Luxembourg, and Muammar Qaddafi.

Haidara housed the collection at the Ahmed Baba Institute, where it could be conserved and digitally archived. But in 2012, Timbuktu fell to the Al Qaeda-supported Islamists, Ansar Dine, and the collection was no longer safe. So, in an extremely delicate and high-risk operation, Haidara masterminded the smuggling of 350,000 volumes out of Timbuktu to safe houses to Bamako, a government territory.

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The rescue entailed quietly gathering the manuscripts into 2,500 metal trunks, and then spiriting them away under the rebels’ noses, primarily using teenage sons and nephews of Timbuktu’s librarians as couriers. Haidara monitored the operation from a control room in Bamako, eight phones ringing every fifteen minutes with updates. Incredibly, every single manuscript was evacuated to safekeeping, though some received rough treatment by soldiers at roadblocks. Ansar Dine was overthrown by French forces in 2013, but the manuscripts remain in hiding.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is rich with historical and military detail, to the extent that at some points maps would have been welcome, giving more breathing space in the text. Joshua Hammer follows two distinct narrative strands: the literary history of Timbuktu and its librarians, and the changing political landscape (and resulting war tactics) within the Maghreb. The result is a fascinating, if at times dense, account to read.

Joshua Hammer The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu Simon and Schuster, 2017, Pb.

11 July 2017

Storyweaver, Pratham Books

08 09 , 2015 No Comments

Welcome to StoryWeaver from Pratham Books : http://www.storyweaver.org.in.

A whole new world of children’s stories. It is a platform that hosts stories in languages across India and beyond. So that every child can have an endless stream of stories in her mother tongue to read and enjoy. StoryWeaver is an open platform designed to be innovative and interactive. It invites both, the weaver of stories and the reader to connect and share the fascinating world of words and illustrations. This then, marks a new chapter in children’s literature and publishing. Come discover the magic of stories and the joy of reading – a cornucopia that will delight endlessly.

Medianama has a wonderful article on Pratham Books and Storyweaver. It is available at: http://www.medianama.com/2015/09/223-pratham-books-open-source/ But I am also copy-pasting the text in case it is not easily available sometimes.

Non profit trust Pratham Books has launched StoryWeaver, an open source digital platform, which features 800 stories in 24 languages (14 Indian and 12 international languages), with an image repository of over 2,000 images. These will be openly licensed and free of cost; content creators and other users will be able to read, download, translate, version-ise and print through the platform. Users will also be able to create and publish new stories, using the Creative Commons licensed content on the site.

The stories are available in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi and Odiya, along with English translations to all these languages (and Tamil and Telugu, excepting Assamese and Malayalam). It lists publishers like itself, African StoryBook Initiative and World Konkani Centre. The stories can be filtered by reading levels as well. The platform provides DIY videos for creating and translating stories. ( https://storyweaver.org.in/tutorials )

Anyone can translate stories by clicking on the ‘translate’ option under the selected story, which redirects you to login via Pratham Books, Facebook or Google+ and provides a host of Indian and African languages, along with French, German and Spanish to translate to. It displays the original text for reference and once done translating it lets users put in a new title, creator details and publish. Pratham Books says that it has generated more work opportunities for illustrators through their CC work. It also states that its primary users are teachers, librarians, writers and parents.

The trust hopes that this move will not only encourage more content creation but also address the scarcity of multilingual story resources in India and multiply it. With the launch of the platform, the trust has also created a “Weave a story” campaign where it has roped in children’s books writers Anushka Ravishankar, Soumya Rajendran, Rohini Nilekani and Rukmini Banerjee to write a special story for children. StoryWeaver will invite users to translate these stories and the trust expects that 100 new versions will spawn out of the 3 original stories. The first story to be launched on the platform is Ravishankar’s “Its All the Cat’s Fault”, which is expected to get 5 derivative versions today.

Google Impact Challenge shortlist
In August 2013, Google had shortlisted 10 non-profit organisations in India as finalists for its Google Impact Challenge intended to support a technology based social project with an award of Rs 3 crores. Among these was Pratham Books which intended to develop an open source platform to create and translate 20,000 e-books in minimum 25 languages to enable 20 million book reads by 2015.

Launch of books crowdsourcing platform
In June, Pratham Books launched a crowdsourcing platform called DonateABook which let nonprofits and schools raise funding for books in order to provide them to Indian children. It connected book seekers with people who wanted to give books away. Then, there were 30 campaigns on the website, looking to raise between Rs 3,500- Rs 110,000 for multiple cities and towns in India.

The projects have been assigned for underprivileged kids, kids from government schools in villages, immigrant construction workers’ children and more, and sought books across Indian and English languages. Individuals as well as organisations who wanted to get books for the children they work with could also start campaigns on the platform. The platform sought to get 50,000 books for children by this Children’s Day, which falls on 14 November every year.

The Bangalore-based trust publishes cost effective books across Indian languages. It publishes books across genres like fiction, science, history, maths and nature among others. It claims to have published over 300 original titles in 18 languages, totalling up to 2,000 books across genres of fiction, nonfiction, and story books on science, history, mathematics and nature

8 Sept 2015

Jumpstart, “Speaking in Tongues”, 29-30 Aug 2013, New Delhi

18 08 , 2013 No Comments

Jumpstart is an annual platform provided in India by the German Book Office (GBO) that is targeted specifically at professionals within the children’s book industry, bringing together authors, publishers, illustrators, designers, booksellers and retailers, teachers and librarians. It began in 2009 with a small workshop for professionals. But over the years it has blossomed into a two-day event that is clearly demarcated by open sessions that include panel discussions and workshops/master classes. Each event revolves around a theme that is encapsulated well in three words — “Join the Dots” (2010); “Out of the Box” ( 2011); “Off the Page” (2012) and this year it is “Speaking in Tongues”. The event is scheduled to be held on 29-30 August 2013, the India International Centre, New Delhi. Since last year the Book Souk, matchmaking between publishers and authors, has become a key aspect of the festival too. Key publishers such as Scholastic India, National Book Trust, HarperCollins, Hachette, Young Zubaan, Tulika, Tara, Karadi Tales, Pratham, Eklavya and others have participated in past Jumpstart festivals with direct, positive outcomes. For instance Pratham Books has recently acquired the publishing rights to five books by the French artist Herve Tullet who participated in 2012.

According to Prashasti Rastogi, Director, German Book Office, Delhi “This year we will focus on language. The festival is organised by the German Book Office New and Frankfurt Academy with support from the Federal Foreign Office, Germany. Our partners are Pratham Books as are our Knowledge Partners along with India International Centre and CMYK Book Store. Pratham Books is partnering for a session with language teachers and librarians.”

The focus on publishing children’s literature in different languages, the challenges and the thrill of doing so are what are to be discussed at the end of August. One of the panel discussions during the open session will be “Translation is tricky. Dialogue is difficult.” Some of the questions being raised are “How can we know that a book that works in one language will work in another? Which stories travel? Which ones ‘stick’? Why are there so few children’s books translated from one Indian language to another? Are illustrations just as culture-bound as words? ” The other Open Sessions that sound fascinating are “Art as language, designer as author” where award-winning illustrators Julia Kaergel, Emily Gravett will be co-panelists with publisher Arundhati Deosthali and Dorling Kindersley Design Director Stuart Jackman; “What is your bhasha? What is your language?” A workshop for teachers and librarians where panel of speakers who have experiences to share about the teaching and learning of different languages and its impact on learning as a whole. Authors will share experiences on why they choose to write in a particular language and their own experiments with it. To the right is a photograph that I took last year from the open session when Herve Tullet was on stage.

Such an event is important given that of 1.1 billion people in India, only 2 per cent are able to read and write English. The number of young people below the age of thirty is 550 million who are not only literate in English, but prefer to communicate in the language . The per capita number of book titles published in India is around 8 per 1,00,000 population. This number is much lower in comparison to those of the countries like the United Kingdom, the United States of America, France, and Germany. According to Rubin D’Cruz, Asst Editor, Malayalam, NBT, in terms of languages, the per capita number of titles published per 1,00,000 persons is 6.3 in Bengali, 6.2 in Gujarati, 5 in Hindi, 4.8 in Kannada, 4.2 in Telugu, 3.9 in Urdu, and 7.7 in Assamese (the highest). The publishing industry in Tamil and Malayalam are extremely active and although the Assamese speaking population is relatively low, the publishing industry in Assamese is a lot more active than it is in Marathi, Bengali, Telugu, Gujarati or Kannada. Some of the statistics from 2012 are:

• Hindi (422 million)
• Bangla (83 million)
• Telugu (74 million)
• Marathi (74 million)
• Tamil (60 million)
• Urdu (51 million)
• Gujarati (46 million)
• Kannada (38 million)
• Malayalam (33 million)
• Oriya (33 million)
• Punjabi (29 million)
• Assamiya (13 million)

From the National Youth Readership Survey, National Book Trust, 2010:
1. Of 1.1 billion people in India, only 2 per cent are able to read and write English.
2. 42% of India’s book-buyers are habitual readers; per capita consumption is Rs 80
3. Literate youth=333 m (2009) = 27.4% of total Indian pop or 73% of total youth pop. Signif: Rural (62%; 206.6m) and Urban (126.1m)
4. Pop of literate youth (2001-9) has grown 2.49% higher than the overall pop growth (2.08%)
5. Growth more rapid in Urban (3.15% p.a) than Rural (2.11% p.a.) areas.
6. Hindi is the principal medium of instruction, however as the youth go for higher education the proportion of Hindi as the medium of instruction declines.
7. Approx 25% literate youth read books for pleasure, relaxation and knowledge enhancement; more females read (27%) for leisure than males.
8. Schools are imp for readership development. 59% developed a reading habit in schools. Peer influence is also an important factor.

Actually publishing in India is exciting. As long as you understand the peculiarities of India like the multi-lingual character of the territory, the reverence Indian readers have for the written word. There exists a thriving middle class; increasing amounts of disposable income coupled with a disposition to read for pleasure rather than to clear an examination (a noticeable shift in recent years). Earlier the inclination was to buy books for children, but slowly between the ages of 8+ till graduation from university the casual reader disappeared, so there were no books available for this segment too. Today there is still a considerable vacuum in this age-group, but the market is slowly being transformed as is evident by the appearance of at least three new imprints for young adults in the past year – Inked (Penguin India), Red Turtle (Rupa Publications) and Scholastic Nova (Scholastic India).

As the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, also patron of Sahitya Akademi, said in a speech he delivered extempore in 1962. “…to think that a language is crushed or suppressed by another language, is not quite correct. It is enriched by another language. So also our languages will be enriched the more they get into touch with each other … .” (p.319-320 Best of Indian Literature 1957-2007, Vol 1 Book 1, Sahitya Akademi. Eds, Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee and A. J. Thomas.)

If the previous editions of Jumpstart are anything to go by, Jumpstart 2013 sounds very promising. I am definitely going to attend this year too!

Jumpstart: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpK_38mScEg
Website and registeration: http://www.jumpstartfest.com/home

18 Aug 2013

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose is an international publishing consultant. She has a monthly column on the business of publishing called “PubSpeak” in BusinessWorld online.

Twitter: @JBhattacharji

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