Award-winning writer and academic Viet Thanh Nguyen is a name that many in the literary world are familiar with. As a Vietnamese-American, he is acutely aware of his two identities and the histories he carries within himself. This is one of the recurring themes of his memoir, A Man of Two Faces. He has written plenty of books, most notably his Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2016 The Sympathiser. It was recently turned into a TV series with Park Chan-wook and Robert Downey Jr. His books are published in India by Hachette India.
In 2023-24, Viet Thanh Nguyen delivered the prestigious Norton Lectures. In the lectures as well as in the discussions that follow, he addresses many of the aspects of being an immigrant in the USA that are at the heart of his moving memoir A Man of Two Faces.
We have recorded more than 134 episodes of TOI Bookmark. Each one is special and memorable. Every conversation is unique. It was an honour and a privilege to record this episode with Viet Thanh Nguyen. He is exceptionally busy with a demanding schedule. Yet, once we had figured out a mutually convenient time to record, across time zones, days and dates, he was immensely courteous and gave us his focussed attention. It did not seem as if he had been in back-to-back meetings/interviews during the day. It was Memorial Weekend in the USA, but he was working.
It was a fascinating conversation about reading and writing memoirs while discussing his book A Man of Two Faces. Also, how he had to think through himself, think through the history of his family that he was dealing with, and think through the language he was going to use.
Incidentally, 30 April 2025 marked fifty years since the conclusion of the Vietnam War.
Listen to the podcast on Spotify:
TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. I have recorded more than 134+ sessions with Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shree awardees, International Booker Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, Women’s Prize for Fiction, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Stella Prize, AutHer Awards, Erasmus Prize, BAFTA, Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction etc. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.
Some of the authors who have been interviewed are: Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhashti, Samantha Harvey, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, NYRB Classics editor and founder Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, Cat Bohannon, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Damodar Mauzo, Boria Majumdar, Geetanjali Mishra, Viet Thanh Nguyen, William Dalrymple, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Annie Ernaux.
Jeet Thayil’s new novel The Elsewhereans: A Documentary Novel is being released by HarperCollins India on 23 June 2025. Jeet has been incredibly prolific in the past few months. He has published two volumes of poems including his stupendous collection I’ll have it Here. There are poems in this volume that bear witness to our new world. Jeet’s poetry is outstanding. The rhythm and performance element are pitch perfect with the words he finds to express his emotions. Hence, his novels are equally fascinating. Always expect the unexpected from Jeet where prose is concerned.
Here is the Spotify link to the TOI Bookmark podcast that I recorded with Jeet earlier this year.
I have just received an advance copy of his novel from the publishers and look forward to reading it asap.
‘Mercurial, witty, luminous’ – DEVIKA REGE
‘Thayil’s masterpiece’ – WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
Jeet Thayil’s The Elsewhereans is a genre-defying novel that melds fiction, travelogue, memoir, a ghost story, a family saga, photographs and much else into a tale that unfolds across continents and decades.
From the backwaters of Kerala to the streets of Bombay, Hong Kong, Paris and beyond, Thayil maps the restless lives of those shaped by separation – both the ones who leave and the ones left behind.
A hypnotic meditation on migration, loss, and the fragile threads of identity from one of the most brilliant voices in contemporary literature, The Elsewhereans is a novel of retrieval and reinvention – an elegy for vanished worlds, and a reckoning with the histories we inherit.
‘The Elsewhereans is a wonderfully rich evocation of the era of decolonization and non-alignment, and the peripatetic lives and multiple perspectives that it made possible. Reading it, I felt like I was meeting many ghosts from my own past.’ AMITAV GHOSH
‘Like the “river of three rivers” at its heart, The Elsewhereans surges forward in multiple narrative currents: autofiction, Kunstlerroman, mourning diary. Dispensing with conventional notions of plot, Thayil draws on real and imagined archives, testimonies and anecdotes to trace the wanderings of a family from Kerala to places as disparate as Bombay, Hanoi, Paris, Elmau and Algeciras. But it is above all his sentences – mercurial, witty, luminous – that pull us through each new and unexpected encounter. The result is a hauntingly lyrical meditation on migration, belonging and grief. The Elsewhereans is Thayil at his finest yet.’ DEVIKA REGE
‘How can a book so melancholy also be so exhilarating? The Elsewhereans blurs timezones and timelines as it traces the wanderings of a family across rivers and oceans, across silences and stories. It is equally attentive to the politics of nation-building and family caretaking. The centre of this dazzling spiral novel is deep love, examined with ruthless poetic precision, and found to be flawed but essential for survival.’ SHAHNAZ HABIB
‘Jeet Thayil just keeps getting better and better: this is writing of great skill and precision, charm and warmth, beauty and wit, taut as a coiled spring, laced with pin-sharp, pitch-perfect dialogue. The Elsewhereans could well be Thayil’s masterpiece.’ WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
Jeet Thayil is a poet, novelist, librettist and musician. He was born into a Syrian Christian family in Kerala. As a boy, he travelled through much of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia with his father, T.J.S. George, a writer and editor. He worked as a journalist for twenty-one years in Bombay, Bangalore, Hong Kong and New York City. In 2005, he began to write fiction. The first instalment of his Bombay Trilogy, Narcopolis, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, won the DSC Prize, and became a bestseller. His book of poems These Errors Are Correct won the Sahitya Akademi Award. His musical collaborations include the opera Babur in London. His essays, poetry and short fiction have appeared in The New York Review of Books, Granta, TLS, Esquire, The London Magazine, The Guardian and The Paris Review, among other venues. Jeet Thayil’s most recent book of poems is I’ll Have It Here.
This is a small book about big disruptions. Over two decades, and across two different political regimes, the world’s largest democracy combined the rise of cheap mobile phones, cheap data and a unique digital ID system to create an unprecedented revolution in digital public goods. This included the rise of path-breaking fintech systems like Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the creation of a new kind of welfare state based on digital direct benefit transfers and interlinked e-governance systems that brought almost half a billion people who never had bank accounts into the financial system. India’s Techade pieces together the story of how this digital revolution came to be. It is a crisp, yet comprehensive account of the systems, the innovators, the processes and the political will that drove the digital enterprise across India. A must-read for anyone who wishes to understand the transformative nature of technology and its deep impact on Indian society, politics and culture.
Nalin Mehta is Managing Editor, Moneycontrol. Earlier he was Dean, School of Modern Media, UPES; President, EDGE Metaversity and Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He has taught and held research positions at universities and institutions in Australia (ANU, La Trobe University), Singapore (NUS), Switzerland (International Olympic Museum) and India (IIM Bangalore, Shiv Nadar University). He was previously Executive Editor, The Times of India-Online, where he led a number of AI-led tech innovations to redefine digital media. He has also served as Managing Editor, India Today (English TV channel) and Consulting Editor, The Times of India. He is the author of five bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including India on Television (winner of the Asian Publishing Award for Best Book on Asian Media, 2009), Behind a Billion Screens (longlisted as Business Book of the Year, Tata Literature Live, 2015), Dreams of a Billion (winner of the Ekamra Sports Book of the Year, 2021, co-authored) and, most recently, The New BJP: Modi and the Remaking of the World’s Largest Political Party.
We recorded a fabulous episode of TOI Bookmark in 2023. It was uploaded in two parts. Here they are:
Recording every episode of TOI Bookmark is an honour and a privilege. I get to speak with incredible writers and publishing professionals around the world. This interview with Hisham Matar was truly special. I have read every single book that he has written so far. My Friends was exceptionally good and I devoured it in one sitting.
Here is a snippet from the conversation:
Going through… if you have ever lived through a moment of great political upheaval and rupture in your country and therefor you have experienced it beside and alongside people whom you know very well, whom you have grown up with, and known for a very long time. I am sure many of your listeners can find many examples in their mind of this. What’s fascinating is that some of those people will agree with you totally about you know what is a hopeful future and how might it look like but then you notice over the years that each one of you ends up in a different place. I think part of the question isn’t ethics or ideology or political persuasion but it is actually questions of temperament. And within political conversations it is impossible to talk about this because nobody knows what you are talking about, but we all know what is temperament. For example, some of our friends are excited by argument and they get really heated up, and I have other friends who grow poetic saying arguments will convince no one. They think that in order to get to the truth, you have to have a different kind of conversation. And they tend to be quieter perhaps and more reluctant. So those are questions of temperament. And I think, I have always thought of the novel really, the novel really is the place for human temperament. Here, I am focussing more on questions of politics, but of course these questions touch and they do deal with these characters, questions of belonging, what love is, friendship is, intimacy is. They affect all of these.
Listen to it on Spotify:
TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. I have recorded more than 130+ sessions with Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, and Padma Shree awardees, International Booker Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, Women’s Prize for Fiction, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Stella Prize, AutHer Awards, Erasmus Prize, BAFTA etc. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.
Some of the authors who have been interviewed are: Banu Mushtaw, Deepa Bhasthi, Samantha Harvey, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, David Nicholls, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, NYRB Classics editor and founder Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, Cat Bohannon, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Damodar Mauzo, David Walliams, Boria Majumdar, Geetanjali Mishra, William Dalrymple, Abdulrazzak Gurnah, and Annie Ernaux.
. It is always a pleasure to converse with academic and bilingual writer, Prof. Harish Trivedi . Recording this episode of #TOIBookmark took us into new and unexplored areas of Indian literature. Our discussion revolved around the recently published Sahitya Akademi volume that has been edited by the prpfessor “Indian Literary Historiography”.
Here is a snippet from the podcast:
“The book contains a history of histories of literatures in our various Indian languages. One thing that I have innovated from the regular Sahitya Akademi model is that in any book that has statements and discussions in many languages that is from the Sahitya Akademi, it always began in the English alphabetical order. So Assamiya came first and Urdu came last and Tamil & Telugu towards the end and Gujarati towards the early part. What I did was because it is a book about historiography is that I said lets begin with the oldest language so that you proceed in a chronological perspective. But that is not easy to determine because everything is political.”
Listen on Spotify:
Indian Literary Historiography (book blurb): The history of Indian literature goes back over three thousand years but “Histories” of Indian literature began to be written only in the nineteenth century. This volume provides a history of these Histories as written by both Western and Indian scholars, and an analysis of the assumptions and preconceptions underlying them. The five essays in Part I outline the key concepts and offer general surveys of the subject. In Part II, fifteen of the essays take up the histories of one major language each, while the last essay looks at histories of “Indian Literature” considered as a whole, focusing especially on some histories published in the 21st century. Some major, and often contentious, issues that run right though the volume are: whether Indians had (or have) a sense of history; whether itihasa-purana or literary sources can be considered as history; whether there is an Indian mode of perceiving time and composing history which is at variance with the Western mode; whether the multilingual plurality and social diversity of Indian literature can possibly be encompassed in any history; and whether history (still) can make a truth-claim or is just another narrative. This volume is a compendium not only of fascinating historical facts but also of literary practices as they have evolved over millennia and the constant alternation of tradition and innovation.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was turned into an HBO limited series. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, his most recent books are A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial; To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other; and the edited volume The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora. All of them have been published by Hachette India.
How do you even begin to describe a book that is gut wrenching, relevant, and absorbing to read? I read it more or less in one fell swoop, despite many false starts. It took a while to read the first few pages and get my bearing. But once I had figured it out, I just read and read and read. A Man with Two Faces is very moving, very thought-provoking and it truly helps decontstruct the concep of America as everyone seems to think that they know. It is told from the point of view of a Vietnamese refugee whose parents flee at the time of the Vietnam war. Viet Thanh Nguyen is fours-year-old. But he seems to carry within him the experience of being a Vietnamese and a successful American. He has broken many barriers by being accepted for who he is, his views, his writing, and his opinion pieces. He has been true to his identity and not allowed anyone to tell him otherwise. All the while he also recognises the intense sacrifices his parents made for the sake of their two sons. Both of whom ended up living the American dream, but at what cost. Their mother quite literally had had to be institutionalised not once, but twice, and finally passed away a woman trapped within herself. It is a heartbreaking account of her downward spiral. Yet, what is extraordinary is that her younger son, the writer, recognises with acute sensitivity what it takes for a woman to live many lives in one. He refers to her marriage at the age of seventeen as the first time she was a refugee when Vietnam was split into two and then the second time, when she fled Vietnam for the USA. Throughout the text, he is able to draw comparisons between the freedom she had in Vietnam, including earning her livelihood and being able to drive a car, but in the USA, she was handicapped by language and ultimately, her existence was circumscribed by the provision store that she ran with her husband and her domestic chores. It broke her, piece by piece.
There is much else in A Man of Two Faces. It is a combination of sophisticated criticism and a witnessing to modern events in the USA. Also, what it takes to be an immigrant.
The writing style at first is peculiar to engage with. But as one proceeds through the book it becomes fairly obvious that these were previously published essays that are now interspersed with present day commentaries and observations by the author. It makes for an interesting visual arrangement on the page, almost like literary art. At the same it, it is like the reader is privileged to be privy to a dialogue. Ultimately, it illustrates the very title of the book wherein the two faces of the author — the public and the private are in constant engagement with each other in the prose format. Fascinating!
Read an extract from the book published on Moneycontrol to coincide with the fifty years of the conclusion of the Vietnam War on 30 April 2025.
Anita Desai’s novella published on 7 July 2024. Rosarita is about a young student from India called Bonita who is visiting San Miguel, Mexico to learn Spanish. One day, while sitting quietly, she is approached by a flamboyantly dressed elderly woman, swishing her skirt, who plonks herself down next to Bonita, insisting that Bonita is “my adored Rosarita’s little girl. You are the image of her when she first came to us as an Oriental bird!” Later, Bonita refers to this stranger as the “Trickster”.
In the pages that follow, Bonita is mystified by the story spun about her mother being an exceptional artist, who stayed in various artist communes and travelled around the country. The Trickster takes Bonita to the various locations, but most of the buildings have been reduced to rubble. Despite her disbelief at her late mother’s life before marriage to her father, Bonita accompanies the Trickster to find out more. She doesn’t find much else. But she does find a sense of belonging in this distant land and realises she need not search any more.
When this book goes out into the world, there will be much said about motherhood and memory. Perhaps, even about grief and finding one’s own space and identity. Whereas, my understanding of reading this stupendous story is the energy criss-crossing generations. It is also making visible the lives women, especially married women, put in one lifetime. Their younger selves and their histories are blanked out in their marriages and thus, to their children too. It takes a special effort to make one’s life visible and share details of the past. Bonita feels bewildered about her mother’s past and her exceptional talent as a painter but she does nothing about it. Instead, she gets caught in a whirlpool of memories that do not help her in any way. She seems to recall her mother publicly being a good wife, hostess, and mum but who was in private, resentful of the chores that fell her way. It’s not said explicitly but mentioned.
The gaps in a mother’s life, before and after marriage, is a violent break that few talk about openly. In Rosarita it is merely displayed but at least it is made visible. Such an important task.
*****
When Pan Macmillan India announced that they were publishing in South Asia #AnitaDesai‘s forthcoming novella “#Rosarita“, it caused quite a stir. I read an ARC and enjoyed it immensely. Later, I was fortunate to record a conversation with the legendary writer. It was late at night for us and at her end, Mrs Desai and her daughter had been battling the aftermath of a terrible storm that had cut off their telephone lines and caused a few other inconveniences. Yet, there they were at the other end, bright and chirpy, ready for this special edition of #TOIBookmark podcast, a Times Special offering on books and literature. It was truly an honour and a privilege to speak with Anita Desai.
*****
Here is a snippet from the recording:
“Yes, I suppose we all do but maybe we only find a little key to that story, that is all and if you have that lingering in your mind, when we have so many encounters, we meet so many people, forget them, forget their names even, others you may have only spent two minutes with but they linger in your mind and that gives you a little key to unlock what you do not know about them. So, like all fiction writers I have to invent their stories for them which of course involves some research like I had to do for Baumgartner, his Jewish European past to do no research for the family in Clear Light of Day. It was a familiar world, I knew everything about it.”
This podcast was recorded at the beginning of 2025. Hence, the reference to the book being forthcoming. Now it has been released in various parts of the world. On 9 May 2025, Catherine wrote on Facebook that the New Zealand edition of The Book of Guilt was reprinted before it was even published! A dream come true for all writers.
We have had a fascinating range of guests on the weekly #TOIBookmark podcast. 124+ guests! The guests featured have been national and international authors including Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, & Padma Shri awardees, Nobel Laureates, Booker Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, BAFTA awardees, diplomats, bestselling authors, debut writers, and legendary writers, across genres and languages. But the conversation was Catherine Chidgey was extra special. For years, I have been hearing about her incredible work and never got a chance to read her books. Thanks to the New Zealand High Commission to India, Bangladesh & Nepal I not only managed to read a pile of Catherine’s incredible novels but got to interview her as well. She has garnered a pile of awards over the years but has also generously given back to the literary community by instituting the Sargeson Prize for short stories in recognition of Frank Sargeson’s influence on New Zealand literature. At NZD 15,000, it is the country’s richest short story award.
Her debut In a Fishbone Church won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book (1998) Awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South East Asia/South Pacific,1999), as well as the Betty Trask Award (1999) in the UK. It was longlisted for the Orange Prize (1999). Other honours include the Prize in Modern Letters (2002), the Katherine Mansfield Award (2013) and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize (2017). Her novel Remote Sympathy was longlisted for the Women’s Prize in the UK and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award (both in 2022).
Her forthcoming novel “The Book of Guilt” (Hachette India) is a compelling work of dystopian fiction. It sparked two international bidding wars and is published in May 2025 by five different English-language publishers! John Murray (UK, in May), Hachette (US, in September), Knopf Canada (September), Penguin Random House Australia (May), Te Herenga Waka University Press (NZ, in May).
Catherine really explores the dark spaces in life, while seemingly not to. She does it well. In the conversation, she says that she really pushes herself hard. If anyone does that, then they squeeze the best out of themselves. It was such a pleasure to chat with “one of New Zealand’s greatest living writers” (Radio NZ).
Here is a snippet from our conversation:
“My life is very busy. So, I teach creative writing full time at the University of Waikato and we have a nine-and-a-half-year-old daughter and somehow around that I also seem to write full time. So the true answer is that I have no social life when I am in the generative phase of a novel rather than the late editing phase. I write first thing in the morning and I take my daughter to school and then I go into the university campus and then I come home and we have dinner and then we get our daughter to bed and then I write again. I do the evening shift. Morning and night, seven days a week. I am pretty hard on myself. I have a daily word count that I have to meet. There is no option of not meeting that. If I exceed it, which I most often do, it doesn’t mean that I get to go easy on myself the next day. The clock resets itself to zero and I have to start again. [Laughs]”
I highly recommend Catherine’s new novel. It is truly unforgettable. It has the incredible knack of popping up in one’s memory while reading other contemporary literature and discovering unexpected threads between the books. Utterly gorgeous!
Susan Van Metre, Executive Editorial Director, Walker Books
Susan Van Metre is the Executive Editorial Director of Walker Books US, a new division of Candlewick Press and the Walker Group. Previously she was at Abrams, where she founded the Amulet imprint and edited El Deafo by Cece Bell, the Origami Yoda series by Tom Angleberger, the Internet Girls series by Lauren Myracle, They Say Blue by Jillian Tamaki, and the Questioneers series by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Pete Fornatale, and their daughter and Lab mix.
Susan and I met when we were a part of the Visiting International
Publishers delegation organised by the Australia Council and Sydney Writers
Festival. It was an incredibly enriching time we spent with other publishing
professionals from around the world. Meeting Susan was fabulous as Walker Books
is synonymous with very high standards of production in children’s literature.
Over the decades the firm has established a formidable reputation. Susan very
kindly agreed to do an interview via email. Here are lightly edited excerpts.
1. How did you get into
publishing children’s literature? Why join children’s publishing at a time when
it was not very much in the public eye?
I never stopped reading children’s
books, even as a teen and young adult. I have always been in love with
story. I was a quiet, lonely young person and storytelling pulled me out
of my small world and set me down in wonderful places in the company of people
I admired. I couldn’t easily find the same richness of plot and character
in the adult books of the era so stuck with Joan Aiken and CS Lewis and E Nesbit
and Ellen Raskin. And I loved the books themselves, as objects, and, in
college, had the idea of helping to make them. I applied to the Radcliffe
Publishing Course, now at Columbia, met some editors from Dutton Children’s
Books/Penguin there, and was invited to interview. Though I couldn’t type
at all (a requirement at the time), I think I won the job with my passionate
conviction that the best children’s books are great
literature, and arguably more crucial to our culture in that they create
readers.
2. How do you commission
books? Is it always through literary agents?
Most of the books I publish come
from agents but occasionally I’ll reach out to a writer who has written an
article that impressed me and ask if they have thought of writing a book. Recently,
I bought a book based on hearing the makings of the plot in a podcast episode.
3. How have the books you
read as a child formed you as an editor/publisher? If you worry about the world
being shaped by men, does this imply you have a soft corner for fiction by
women? ( Your essay, “Rewriting the Stories that Shape Us”)
What a good question. I definitely
look for books with protagonists that don’t typically take centre stage,
whether it’s a girl or a character of colour or a character with a disability.
I have always been attracted to heroes who are underdogs or outsiders, ones
that prevail not because they have special powers or abilities but because they
have determination and heart. I am in love with a book on our Fall ’19 list, a
fantasy whose hero is a teen girl with Down syndrome. It’s The Good
Hawk by Joseph Elliott. I have never met a character like Agatha
before—she’s all momentum and loyalty. Readers will love her.
4. Who are the writers/artists that have influenced your publishing
career/choices?
I am very influenced by brainy,
hardworking creators like Ellen Raskin and Cece Bell and Mac Barnett and Sophie
Blackall and Jillian Tamaki. I admire a great work ethic, outside-the-box
thinking, an instinct for how words and images can work together to create a
richly-realized story, and respect for kids as fully intelligent and emotional
beings with more at stake than many adults.
5. As an employee- and author-owned company, Candlewick is used
to working collaboratively in-house and with the other firms in the Walker
groups. How does this inform your publishing programme? Does it nudge the
boundaries of creativity?
There is so much pride at Walker and
Candlewick. Owning the company makes us feel that much more invested in
what we are making because it is truly a reflection of us and our values and
tastes. Plus, we only make children’s books and thus put our complete resources
behind them. There are no pesky, costly adult books and authors to distract us.
And I think the strong lines of communication amongst the offices in Boston,
New York, London, and Sydney mean that we have a good global perspective on
children’s literature and endeavour to make books with universal appeal. I
think all these factors contribute to innovation and quality.
6. You have spent many years in publishing, garnering
experience in three prominent firms —Penguin USA, Abrams and Candlewick
Press. In your opinion have the rules of the game for children’s publishing
changed from when you joined to present day?
Oh, definitely. When I started,
children’s publishing was a quiet corner of the business, mostly dependent on
library sales. There was no Harry Potter or Hunger Games or Wimpy Kid; no
great juggernauts driving millions of copies and dollars. And not really
much YA. YA might be one spinner rack at the library, not the vast
sections you see now, full of adult readers. Now children’s and YA is big business
and mostly bright spots in the market. The deals are bigger and the risk is
bigger and the speed of business is so much faster!
7. Do you discern a change in reading patterns? Do these
vary across formats like picture books, novels, graphic novels? Are there
noticeable differences in the consumption patterns between fiction and
nonfiction? Do gender preferences play a significant role in deciding the
market?
I think we are in a great time for
illustrated books, whether they are picture books, nonfiction, chapter books,
or graphic novels. And now children can move from reading picture books
to chapter books to graphic novels without giving up full colour illustrations
as they age. And why should they? Visual literacy is so important to our
internet age—an important way to communicate online.
8. One of the iconic books of modern times that you have worked
upon are the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Tell me more about
the back story, how it came to be etc. Also what is your opinion on the
increasing popularity of graphic novels and how has it impacted children’s
publishing?
I am not the editor of the Wimpy Kid
books—that’s Charles Kochman—but I was lucky enough to help sign them up and
bring them to publication as the then head of the imprint they are published
under, Amulet Books. Charlie comes out of comics so when he saw the
proposal for Wimpy Kid, which had been turned down elsewhere, he understood the
skill and appeal of it. I have NEVER published anything that took off so
immediately. I think we printed 25,000 copies, initially, and we sold out
of them in two weeks. It showed how hungry readers were for that strong
play of words and images, and how they longed for a protagonist who was flawed
but who didn’t have to learn a lesson. Adult readers have many such
protagonists to enjoy but they are rarer in kids’ books.
9. Walker Books are inevitably heavily illustrated, where each
page has had to be carefully designed. Have any of your books been translated?
If so what are the pros and cons of such an exercise?
Our lead Fall title, Malamander, is illustrated and has been
sold in a dozen languages. I think illustration can be a big plus in
conveying story in a universally accessible way.
10. The Walker Group is known for its outstanding production quality
of printed books. Has the advancement of digital technology affected the world
of children’s publishing? If so, how?
I think they incredible efficiency
of modern four-colour printing has allowed us to spend money on other aspects
of the book, like cloth covers or deckled edges. That sort of
thing. Children’s books are incredible physical objects these days.
11. Walker Books’ reputation is built on its ability to be creatively
innovative and constantly adapt to a changing environment. How has the group
managed to retain its influence in this multimedia culture?
First, thank you for saying
so! I think the rest of media still looks to book publishing for great
stories and as a house that has always invested in talent, we are lucky enough
to have stories that work across many forms of media.
12. Have any of books you have worked upon in your career been
banned? If so, why? What has been the reaction?
Yes. In fact, I am working with Lauren Myracle on a young adult novel, publishing in Spring ’21, called This Boy. Lauren is the author of the ttyl series, which was on the ALA’s Banned Book list for many years. It was challenged for its depictions of teenage sexuality. I was raised to be modest and rule following so my personal reaction was horror—especially when parents started phoning me directly to complain—but I feel so strongly that kids and teens deserve to read about life as it really is—not just as we wish it would be. So I came to be proud of the designation. Nothing is scarier than the truth.
