The following panelists have confirmed their participation for Publishing Next, 2011.
Where are Digital Books headed?
Moderator: Jaya Bhattacharji Rose
Jaya Bhattacharji Rose, international publishing consultant, editorial professional and critic has been associated with Indian publishing since the early 1990s. Her responsibilities have included guest-editing the special Children’s and YA Literature of The Book Review, and producing the first comprehensive report on the Indian Book Market for the Publisher’s Association, UK. Her articles, interviews and book reviews have also appeared in Frontline, The Book Review, DNA, Outlook, The Hindu, Hindustan Times, Folklife, LOGOS, Business World, The Hoot, Asian Age and Muse India. She is also Literary Director, Siyahi.
Prathibha Sastry
Ms. Prathibha Sastry has spent over 14 plus years in various entertainment-related activities. She began as founder of South Movie Scenes, a monthly English-language film magazine exclusively dedicated to the South Indian Film Industry, which gave the Industry its first global platform. She served as Publisher and Editor, and was responsible for the overall look and feel of the magazine. It was applauded by the British Council, which presented Ms. Sastry with the award for Young Screen Entrepreneur- India 2008-09. The award offered Ms. Sastry had the opportunity to represent India at the International Young Screen Entrepreneur Programme held in London during October, 2008.
Currently she is Head-Publications of JiniBooks and Co-Founder of JiniLabs. JiniBooks is India’s first Book Stand featuring a range of books right from comics, magazines, coffee table books to journals. JiniBooks will source out and collect the best of the books that are not easily available in the market and bring them to readers through JiniBooks. This free app on iPad will bring the next generation books – including small size, mid-size independent publishers, university presses, e-book publishers, and self-published authors – right at your fingertips.
Radhika Menon
Radhika Menon’s deep interest in children and their reading inspired her to set up Tulika Publishers in 1996. Her publishing philosophy is underlined by the belief that translating across different languages gives voice and image to cultural diversity in a way publishing in one language does not. Fifteen years and around 1000 titles later, Tulika is regarded as the benchmark of children’s publishing in India, producing books in nine languages – English, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati and Bangla. A hands-on publisher, Radhika is closely involved with the visualising, editing, designing and marketing of all Tulika books.
In 2000, she started the first exclusive children’s bookstore in India – Goodbooks – which she ran successfully for over five years. The Goodbooks Trust continues to advise in the setting up libraries and reading programmes. Radhika is part of the team that is setting up a website for children’s books – again a first of its kind resource on childrens’ books – which will carry reviews as well as archival articles and reviews from the 1970s. She has been on various committees of the National Book Trust and NCERT, New Delhi, and on the advisory panel of Anveshi, Hyderabad for its project Different Tales: Stories from Marginal Cultures. Currently, she is on the advisory committee of Eklavya’s publishing programme and of their proposed Children’s Literature Centre in Bhopal.
James Bridle
James Bridle pushes the boundaries of literature through creative technology. He is the director of Bookkake, a technology-led publisher of classic transgressive literature. He is also the developer of bkkeepr, a social reading application, and London Lit Plus, an open-source literary festival. He writes about literature and technology at http://booktwo.org, and has edited and written for numerous publications, online and off.
James was one of the finalists of the UK YCE Publishing Award 2009.
Kailash Balani
Mr. Kailash Balani is currently the Managing Director of Aditya Books Pvt.Ltd.,Balani Infotech Pvt.Ltd.,Lawman India Pvt.Ltd.,iGroup Infotech India Pvt.Ltd., A 2 Z Teaching and Learning Solutions Pvt.Ltd.and Global Music Institute. He has been in the publishing industry since 1974 and has worked with Tata McGraw-Hill, Wiley Eastern,Narora Publishing House, Butterworths,UK and Asian Books before starting his own company Aditya Books in 1987. His companies deal in both print and online products in all subject areas like Management, Science & Technology, Social Sciences, Law and Pharmacy etc. and for K-12 to higher education. Mr. Balani loves traveling and has attended many Book Fairs, Conferences and Seminars in India and abroad . Mr. Balani also is currently the President of Federation of Publishers and Booksellers Associations in India, a post he has held since December 2010.
Michael Bhaskar
Michael Bhaskar is currently Digital Publishing Director at leading independent publisher Profile Books. He is responsible for spearheading their digital strategy, ebook program and digital business development in creating new products and platforms. Whilst there he has produced games, apps and created a commercially successful digital publishing program. Previously Michael was Digital Editor at Macmillan, where he worked on their large and profitable ebooks program, a Facebook app and several iPhone apps amongst other innovative projects, and wrote for The Digitalist blog. Over the past few years Michael has written extensively on digital publishing. He regularly lectures at publishing university courses around the UK and has recently completed a paper for the journal Logos. He was worked the literary agency Rogers, Coleridge and White, reviewed books at The Daily Telegraph and worked for an economics research firm, as well as building websites like www.quikqr.com, a 2-d barcode generator.
The Impact of Alternate Publishing
Chetna
Chetna started Graffiti Publishing House in January this year in a bid to explore India’s digital publishing space. Her first ezine, Bubble Wrapped, caters to NGOs and CSR programmes and she hopes to make it a platform for communication and information exchange for the social sector. She is also a freelance writer currently writing a monthly feature titled The Coffee Diary for Frappe, a lifestyle magazine based in Chennai as well as one-off pieces for various other publications in Mumbai. Her past experience includes a year with Paprika Media where she headed the Custom-Publishing cell and six years with Focus Communication where she worked in a multi-skilled role that encompassed client interface, planning as well as copy writing.
Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones
Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones is Director of the Mercator Institute for Media, Languages and Culture, a research institute based at the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University that specialises in the fields of media, publishing, communication and translation, with a particular expertise in multilingual contexts. Elin is Senior Lecturer in Media and Creative Industries (undergraduate and postgraduate studies) and Director of Knowledge Transfer and Enterprise at the same department. Digital Creative Economy, is currently a strong research focus for Mercator and Elin is supervising several PhD projects in this field. Mercator is coordinator of the Minority Languages Media Research Network and is home to the Wales Literature Exchange and Literature Across Frontiers and is one of the key partners in Mercator Network of Language Diversity Centres.
Sreejata Guha
Sreejata Guha has translated from Bengali into English extensively. Titles in her list include Penguin India publications like The Home and the World (Rabindranath Tagore), The Menagerie and Other Byomkesh Bakshi Mysteries (Saradindu Bandopadhyay), Devdas (Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay) and A Grain of Sand: Chokher Bali (Rabindranath Tagore). Associated with Indian publishing as a freelance editor for many years now, in 2011 Guha has co-founded www.shonakatha.com — the first online audio bookstore of India in a regional language (Bengali).
Maitreyi Kandoi
Maitreyi Kandoi started Kindle three years ago with a vision to reach out to the youth in the most cerebral possible way .
Kindle has in course of time , become more than a magazine , reaching out to thousands of students across schools and colleges through workshops and events. To read more about this unique initiative, visit www.kindlemag.in
Peter Griffin
Peter Griffin is a journalist who works in Bombay. He has changed careers several times: prior to this, he has sold advertising space, wrote ads for ten years, then wrote columns, freelance travel stories and other features, produced websites, consulted on communication, assisted NGOs, compered live shows, did some voice-overs, was a part-time RJ and once hosted a TV show. He co-founded and moderates the writers’ forum, Caferati, and is joint editor of its imprint, Caferati Creative. For the last five years, he has co-curated the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival’s literature section. He also hosts the annual Godawful Poetry Fortnight online. He co-founded the South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog, and a number of successors, including Mumbai Help, all of which eventually became the World Wide Help group, an informal collective of volunteers for online disaster relief.
Vaishali Khandekar
Vaishali Khandekar is the founder and editor of Reading Hour, a bimonthly print magazine published from Bangalore and available in major cities across India.
Reading Hour was launched in January 2011. It carries short fiction, verse, interviews and general interest articles, by established as well as new writers. Translations from regional languages into English are also featured. Reading Hour was started with the objective of showcasing fresh Indian creative writing, in a format that caters for today’s time starved readers. Find out more about Reading Hour at http://readinghour.in and www.facebook.com/readinghour.
Prior to this venture, Vaishali worked for several years in the software industry followed by a couple of years in a non-profit organisation.
Book Marketing in the Age of Social Media
Moderator: Preeti Vyas
Preeti is a retail professional with over 15 years of experience in the books, music, publishing and retail industry. She has worked in various companies such as Toys “R” Us Australia, Sony Music, Crossword, Globus Stores, and the Future Group. She was also the owner/operator of the children’s bookstore Kidztown in Bandra between 2001-05. She is the founder of FunOKPlease, a children’s publishing company focusing on contemporary Indian content for children. It was founded in 2011. Preeti has also been actively involved in the editing and marketing of the bestselling books ‘The Immortals of Meluha’ and ‘The Secret of the Nagas’, part of the Shiva Trilogy authored by her husband Amish.
In her last assignment Preeti was responsible for launching Depot, the Future group’s (Pantaloon retail) foray into the books & music industry.
Kiruba Shankar
Kiruba Shankar is CEO of Business Blogging, a full-service social media consultancy He has 15 years of experience in the Internet space. Prior to this, he was Associate Director at Sulekha.com.
He has authored books on Wikipedia, Crowdsourcing, Unconferences, Creative Commons and Personal Branding and technology columns at Business Standard and Financial Express newspapers. Kiruba has taught at Asian College of Journalism and Madras Advertising Club and has lectured on Social Media at IIM Kozhikode, IIM Bangalore and IIT Madras.
Kiruba has helped organize TEDxChennai and is the Indian Ambassador for TEDx programs across India. TED is a prestigious platform that brings together the World’s most fascinating thinkers and doers. He is the curator of http://Cerebrate.in, an international event for achievers. A rowing champion who has captained the Sify Rowing Team to four championship titles, Kiruba is a professional podcaster and hosts a show at http://Kiruba.TV , where he interviews passionate achievers from different fields. He can be reached at Kiruba@Kiruba.com.
Kinjal Shah
Currently the COO of Crossword Bookstores, Kinjal has previously worked in various capacities such as Buying & Merchandising head, Category manager & Franchise Manager. He has played a significant role in the growth of Crossword Bookstores, having helped it grow to a chain of 74 stores up from 12 when he joined the company.
Launched in 1992, Crossword currently has 80 stores across 20 cities in the country in Ahmedabad, Amritsar, Aurangabad, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Chennai, Durgapur, Hyderabad, Indore, Jaipur, Lucknow, Nashik, New Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Udaipur, Vapi & Vadodara. Crossword Bookstores Ltd. is a wholly owned subsidiary Company of Shopper’s Stop Ltd – India’s leading department store chain.
Lipika Bhushan
An MBA in Marketing with 8 years of rich experience in the areas of Strategic Planning and Brand Management, Lipika currently heads the Marketing department of HarperCollins India. Her experience in White Goods and Brand Consultancy exposed her to marketing of FMCG, Telecom, Retail and other product categories and has helped her bring in new elements to the way books are marketed in India. While juggling between publicity, events and rolling out promotional campaigns for individual authors and their books, she has rolled out some of the most successful retail end campaigns. She is proud of the international award of Excellence for Best Use of Multimedia Marketing conferred upon by Asian Multimedia Publishing Awards 2009 for The White Tiger Campaign. Her recent classroom experience at IIM Ahmedabad has added a new perspective in her understanding of the idea of Innovation.
Maegan Chadwick-Dobson
Maegan studied History at the University of Oxford, before starting her career in the communications office of a Cambridge College. For the past year, she has been working in the publicity & marketing department of Tara Books, Chennai, managing Tara’s social media strategy. Maegan also writes on a freelance basis, and her work has been published by The Guardian (UK) and The Indian Express, among other publications.
Nikhil Pahwa
Nikhil Pahwa is the Founder and Editor of MediaNama.com, India’s premier source of news and analysis of the Telecom and Digital Media. He has been involved with online communities for eleven years, five of which have been as a journalist providing perspective on the evolving digital content and services ecosystem in India, three of them as a Publisher. Prior to founding MediaNama in 2008, he was the Editor of ContentSutra, a part of the ContentNext network of digital media focused publications, now owned by the Guardian Media Group.
Publishing Houses of the Future
Moderator: Nilanjana S Roy
Nilanjana S Roy is a Delhi-based literary columnist and critic who also writes on gender issues. Her columns appear in the Business Standard and the International Herald Tribune. She is the editor of Penguin India’s anthology of food writing, A Matter of Taste, and is working on a collection of essays on reading, How To Read in Indian, to be published soon by HarperCollins India.
Atiya Zaidi
Atiya Zaidi, currently publisher at Ratna Sagar Pvt. Ltd., has spent over 25 years in publishing, and specializes in content creation for schools. The content she has developed is now used in leading schools across the country. Although she has developed material for the Sciences, Social Sciences, value education and Mathematics, she specialises in English Language Teaching (ELT). Atiya has presented papers on ELT and learning methodology at international conferences, and is on the faculty of two major publishing courses. She has a post graduate degree in English Literature.
Payal Kumar
Payal Kumar, currently Vice President Editorial & Publishing, SAGE India, was born in Lusaka, Zambia, then spent a couple of years in Fiji before settling down in Manchester, England at the age of 10. After completing her Masters in Religious Studies from SOAS, London University, she pursued a Postgraduate Diploma in Newspaper Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire. In 1991 she decided to settle in India and take up journalism as a profession. She worked as a journalist for The Hindustan Times in India for over a decade, more specifically as a senior desk editor.
Thereafter she moved into the corporate sector where she took up the challenge of recruiting 80 editors while setting up proficient systems for a versatile editorial department at the Princeton Review. Today Payal is handling the editorial, production and design departments at SAGE Book publishers, India, where her teams produce close to 120 academic books and 40 journals a year. Tapping her editorial expertise, she has presented several talks on the Art of Academic Writing including at various educational institutions around the country, including IIT, Delhi, XLRI and Lady Irwin college.
Her zest for learning continues and today she is pursuing a doctoral programme from a leading Indian Business School (XLRI), specializing in Organisational Behaviour.
Ramu Ramanathan
Ramu Ramanathan is editor of PrintWeek India, and boasts of 20 years of industry experience. He heads a team of 45 at PrintWeek India which has a print run of 11,000+ and is distributed to 350 cities.
He is also a playwright-director and a regular columnist for many mainstream newspapers. His plays include 3 Sakina Manzil, Collaborators, Comrade Kumbhakarna, Cotton 56 Polyester 84, Jazz, Mahadevbhai, The Boy Who Stopped Smiling and many others. Most of these have been performed in India and at international theatre festivals.
Sunil Patki
Sunil Patki, currently a strategy and business planning consultant within the publishing industry and co-founder of notjustpublishing.in, has previously worked with BPI India (Managing Director), Macmillan India (National Sales Head – Higher Education & General), Corpus Collosum Learning (CEO), Thomson Learning (Regional Manager – South Asia), Simon & Schuster (Regional Manager – South Asia), and Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company (Regional Manager – West). Having set up and ran new business offices for international publishing houses in India in late 1990s and early 2000, he boasts of 28 years of track record of success in the publishing industry through strategic planning, strong leadership and organizational skills, ability to meet goals, identification and development of new opportunities in competitive and niche markets, and aggressive sales and marketing.
Trisha Gupta
Trisha Gupta has an MA in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Cambridge and an M.Phil from Columbia University. She is based in Delhi, where she works as a writer, critic and editor. She is Editorial Consultant at Biblio, and has written for Tehelka, Caravan, Outlook Traveller, Time Out, Indian Express and the Sunday Guardian, among others. Her published writing is archived at her blog Chhotahazri: www.trishagupta.blogspot.com
Ulhas Latkar
Ulhas Latkar started Ameya Prakashan in 1993 and has since published numerous biographies and books for teachers education. His mission with Ameya Prakashan has been to highlight the stories of extraordinary people who have made a mark in society. Ameya Prakashan has been honoured by ‘The Limca Book of Records’ for creating a National record in the field of Publishing. In 2000, Mr. Latkar started a free ebooks site marking his entry into the then-nascent digital publishing world. As a responsible member of the publishing fraternity, Ameya Prakashan supports and incorporates best practices in trade publishing.
Copyright Issues in Publishing
Moderator: Vinutha Mallya
Vinutha Mallya is Senior Editor at Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad. In this capacity, she oversees all editorial activities, including project management, web-presence and promotions. Her diverse work experience has ranged over print media, educational content development, research and online content management systems, before she began her career in publishing.
Now specialising in illustrated books, her past projects have included self-help books, fiction, scholarly research publications, and NGO reports. She has written for The Hindu, Rediff.com, Housecalls and The TechMail, Churumuri.com, Hard News, Mint Lounge, LOGOS and Publishing Perspectives. Vinutha has worked in Bangalore, London, Kuala Lumpur and Ahmedabad. She obtained an MS in Communication from the Manipal Institute of Communication (2000), and an MA in Journalism from Goldsmiths, University of London (2003). She was a Fellow of the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2010.
Pranesh Prakash
Pranesh Prakash is a Programme Manager at the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based non-profit research and policy advocacy organization. He works primarily in areas where technology and public policy intersect. This includes the areas of access to knowledge and reform of the current intellectual property rights’ regime, and exploring alternatives to copyright- and patent-based creativity and innovation including open standards, free/open ource software, open access to scholarly literature, and open content. He also works in the areas of governmental transparency through means such as open government data, and freedom of expression in the digital sphere. He holds a degree in arts and law from the National Law School, Bangalore.
Through his work he seeks to establish that copyright law as it exists today cannot serve an a useful edifice for the publishing industry, especially with e-publishing, because it serves as a barrier to access to knowledge while deepening the inequalities of the global knowledge flows. He believes that developing countries should make full use of the flexibilities the international copyright regime affords to help ensure that persons with disabilities, students and teachers, librarians and archivists, researchers, and persons in the Global South have access to knowledge to enable them to participate in cultural self-expression.
Madhukar Sinha
A Post Graduate in Economics and Management from University of Delhi, Madhukar Sinha has worked in various capacities over the last 24 years as an officer of the Government of India. He was the Registrar of Copyright for close to three years during which time he represented India in various negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization.
In his current capacity as Professor with the Centre for WTO Studies, he conducts research in trade issues related to Intellectual Property Rights, Services, Investments and Government Procurement.
Kannan Sundaram
S.R. Sundaram (“Kannan”) began his literary career as the editor of Kalachchuvadu, the Tamil literary quarterly that was originally launched by Sundara Ramaswamy. Within a few years the journal had established itself as the premier magazine alternative publications in Tamil Nadu and expanded beyond the reaches of a literary journal by becoming a broad forum for arts and ideas. In tandem with the journal, Kannan launched a publishing house in 1995. Kalachchuvadu Publications has since expanded to publish seminal texts covering fiction, non-fiction, literary criticism, social and political comment.
Kannan is the author of several articles on politics and media in Kalachchuvadu, Dinamani, Thinnai.com, Ulagathamizh.com, Subamangala, Pudhia Paarvai, Uyir Ezhuthu etc. His papers include “The Great Copy Right Hoax – Untold Story of 20th Century Tamil Publishing” in a workshop organized by Independent Publishers Distribution Alternatives in association with Asian College of Journalists in Chennai in March 2007 and “Independent and Alternative Tamil Publishing – The Story of a cultural battle against all odds” presented at the seminar by the Indian Book Publishing Today at Thiruvananthapuram Book Fair in December 2008.
Mandira Sen
Mandira Sen is a partner of Bhatkal and Sen, founded in 1990, which publishes two imprints: Stree (gender studies, founded 1990) and Samya (on culture, dissent, and the writings of dalits, founded 1996). She is based in Calcutta and publishes about 8-9 books a year.
After spending nearly six years in publishing in the USA, starting as an editorial assistant at Schenkman Publishing Co at Harvard Square in 1972, continuing as one in Little Brown’s medical publishing department in Boston, and as a copyeditor at Houghton Mifflin’s trade department, Mandira returned to Calcutta and worked as the regional editor of Orient Longman and then from about 1982 explored ways of starting a company on her own. In 1984, she formed Mandira, and published mostly children’s books and some social science, and learnt about how difficult it was to distribute books for a small independent publisher. At this time, while trying to improve distribution, she met the Bhatkals of Popular Prakashan, Bombay, and by 1990, the partnership of Bhatkal and Sen, mentioned earlier, was formed. She is also a partner of Independent Publishers Distribution Alternatives (IPDA).
G. R. Raghavender
G. K. Raghavender is Registrar of Copyrights and Director in the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development. He is involved in policy making in copyrights and related rights and is also in charge of copyright and ISBN registration. He is a part of the Indian delegation that attends WIPO meetings. Previously, he has worked in the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, and in the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting where he dealt with broadcasting development, content, policy, regulation of TV Channels and its monitoring. Mr. Raghavender holds a post graduate degree from Institute of Social Studies (ISS), the Hague, the Netherlands in M.A. Development Studies (Public Policy & Management).
Managing the Translation Market
Moderator: Arshia Sattar
Arshia Sattar has a Ph.D. in classical Indian literatures from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her translations from Sanskrit, Tales from the Kathasaritsagara and the The Ramayana of Valmiki have been published by Penguin Books. She has also written two books for children, Kishkindha Tails and Pampa Sutra, both published by the Kishkindha Trust. Arshia has been a story consultant for Usborne Publishing in the UK and writes widely on books and literature for various Indian and international publications. She also teaches narrative techniques and classical Indian literatures at various academic institutions in India and abroad.
Rubin D’Cruz
An editor/ publisher by profession, Rubin D’Cruz has worked in different public sector / voluntary organization publishing firms since 1987, mainly in Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad and National Book Trust, India. He has worked as editor of the Malayalam department of NBT for 12 years and during this period produced a large number of children’s books in Malayalam among other books.
Rubin has participated in the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Italy as an Indian delegate and was a member of Eureka Children’s Science Magazine’s editorial board and later a member of the publication committee of the KSSP. He has also been a member of the advisory committee of the Department of Publication, University of Kerala.
At present Rubin is the Director, Kerala State Institute of Children’s Literature and edits Thaliru, a children’s magazine for ten plus age group. He remains actively involved in children’s literature projects in Kerala and other parts of India and now lives with his nine year old son, Aaromal, at Thiruvananthapuram.
Judith Oriol
Judith Oriol graduated from Université La Sorbonne, Paris IV with a PhD in French Literature. She was the head of the French Book Office in Bucharest at the French Embassy in Romania from 2004 to 2006 and from then until 2010, worked in the Gallimard Publishers’ Foreign Rights Department, where she was in charge of all the projects of translation into Eastern European countries. She is currently the Book Attachée at the French Embassy in India, having started her work there in September 2010.
Mr. Winston Cruz
Since its inception, Mr. Winston Cruz is with National Translation Mission, a Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India initiative for translating and publishing knowledge texts related to higher education. He is the team leader of the Publication Team and has been involved at the level of taking policy decisions for the Mission in this regard. He has been interacting with publishers throughout the country and even outside the country at various levels for getting the copyrights and assigning the translations in regional languages.
Mr. Winston Cruz is an M.Phil. in Applied Linguistics from University of Hyderabad and has completed his Masters in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
K. Satyanarayan
K. Satyanarayan (Satya) is the co-founder of New Horizon Media, a Chennai-based Indian language publishing house with focus on publishing non-fiction in the Indian languages in multiple formats including, printed books, audio books and e-books. Satya is an alumnus of IIT Madras and Cornell University. He had earlier been one of the co-founders of Cricinfo.com, the world’s most popular cricket website, which was sold to the UK-based Wisden Group in 2003. Satya also has a long-standing interest in education and writes a blog on education at http://prayatna.typepad.com/education
Neeta Gupta
Neeta Gupta is the publisher at Yatra Books and a literary consultant with a special emphasis on translations. She is also the editor of Bharatiya Anuvad Parishad’s quarterly journal on translation, Anuvad. Yatra Books and Bharatiya Anuvad Parishad share strategic strengths and draw synergy and creativity from their complementary activities.
Yatra Books has been co-ordinating Penguin’s Indian Languages Publishing Programme since January 2005. They have published almost two hundred titles together in Hindi, Urdu and Marathi. These books have been published both in translation as well as in the original languages.
In 2010, Yatra Books launched an independent ‘international bookshelf’. These are translations from Catalan, French and Italian into Indian languages, published in collaboration with European publishers and institutes.
Arunava Sinha
Arunava Sinha is a translator of classic and contemporary Bengali fiction. His latest published translations are The Chieftain’s Daughter (Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay) andThree Women (Rabindranath Tagore) – both part of the Random House Bengali Classics Series, of which he is the series editor. His earlier translations include What Really Happened and Other Stories (Banaphool), By The Tungabhadra(Saradindu Bandyopadhyay), Striker Stopper (Moti Nandy), and My Kind of Girl (Buddhadeva Bose). His translation of Sankar’s Chowringhee won the Vodafone-Crossword translation prize for 2007, and was shortlisted for the Independent Best Foreign Fiction prize in the UK for 2009.
The Future of Independent Publishing
Moderator: Indu Chandrashekhar
Indira (Indu) Chandrasekhar, Publisher and Managing Editor of Tulika Books, New Delhi, has been associated with Indian publishing since the early 1980s. She began her publishing career with Macmillan India and worked for several years as a freelance editor, with brief stints at teaching in Bangalore and Delhi University in the intervening years, before setting up Tulika Books in 1995. Tulika Books is a small, independent publisher of academic books in the humanities and social sciences, and the authors published by them include some of India’s best known left intellectuals and academics.
She is a founding partner of the Independent Publishers’ Distribution Alternatives (IPDA), a distribution network set up by eight independent publishers to promote alternative/independent publishing in India; and of the Independent Publishers’ Group (IPG), a collective of ten independent publishers based in Delhi who run a bookshop at Delhi University.
Amrita Akhil
Amrita Akhil, Director of Marketing of the Independent Publishers Distribution Alternatives (IPDA) since its inception in 2005, has established it as a stable platform for marketing and distributing books published by not just IPDA’s 8 founding partner-publishers but by forty other independent publishers as well.
Before IPDA was set up, she worked with Katha as Team Leader, Marketing & Sales, and Team Member, Networking & Fund Raising. She has participated in ‘Global Youth Information Technology Incubator Training’ at Santa Clara University, USA. Networking and interacting with people is what she loves to do and is a professional in the world of book-marketing by a happy accident of fate.
Alvito Barreto, Owner, Focus Bookstore, Bangalore
Mandira Sen, partner of Bhatkal and Sen, founded in 1990, which publishes two imprints: Stree (gender studies, founded 1990) and Samya (on culture, dissent, and the writings of dalits, founded 1996).
Radhika Menon, Owner of Tulika Publishers, Chennai
Workshop on The Art of Academic Writing
Payal Kumar, Vice President, Editorial & Production, SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd
Workshop on Social Media Marketing
Maya Hemant Krishna
Maya Hemant Krishna holds a degree in Mass Communication, Psychology and English and has done a course in Arts Management. She has previously worked as an assistant director with a television production house. She currently works with Pratham Books, a not-for-profit children’s publisher in India and manages its social media presence with a focus on community building and engagement. This involves building partnerships and alignments between the mission and their content to enable a book in every child’s hands.
Maegan Chadwick-Dobson, Social Media Strategy, Tara Books