Jury Citation for Searching for the Songbird

Author: Ravina AggarwalPublisher: Young Zubaan “A motley group of school friends investigating a crime and a mysterious disappearance in the Himalayan foothills… if it sounds familiar, you’re not mistaken. But the beauty of Ravina Aggarwal’s Searching for the Songbird lies in how effortlessly it ties together various provocative themes and, quite literally, draws young readers into the music of the Doon Valley.…

Jury Citation for Grandfather’s Tiger Tales

Author: Anjana BasuPublisher: Talking Cub “The ever-expanding body of children’s literature featuring tigers gets another excellent addition in Grandfather’s Tiger Tales. The three stories in this anthology bring together familiar and unfamiliar narratives – of a tiger that came to a cricket match, of the fearsome tiger god Dakshin Ray of the Sunderbans, and of a tiger and a man sharing…

Jury Citation for We Are the Dancing Forest

Author: Raj Shekhar, Devashish Makhija, Venkat Shyam and Nina SabnaniPublisher: Tulika “The striking musicality and eye-catching visuals of this book in verse by Devashish Makhija, Raj Shekhar, Venkat Shyam and Nina Sabnani lure readers into the world of Adivasis, ‘…the earth’s kuiya-muiya, singing the forest’s haiya-huiya’ where the river mumbles, the fish babble, hills whisper, trees tumble and everything sways to…

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Kungfu Aunty Versus Garbage Monsters

Publisher: Speaking TigerAuthor: Shweta Taneja Trash Rajah, the dictator of Pretty City, has declared there should be piles of stinking garbage, unending pollution, foaming lakes, and disgusting toxic creations everywhere. Trash Rajah and his garbage army need an endless supply of garbage to keep them alive—and the humans of Pretty City must provide it. But when their only playground is…

Maari
Of Culture and Nature

By Sangeetha Menon “Kanmani watched her village from the hill. The lands stood dry and bare, broken even. The skies stared back in defence as the sun growled.” These are the opening lines of Maari, a story about a village in Tamil Nadu dealing with severe drought and finding solace through culture. The young protagonist, Kanmani, is worried as she…

Desert Feature
The Richness of Literary Deserts

By Monisha Raman With inputs from Meghaa Gupta We do not have prose praising the deserts as Thoreau praised the woods or Hemingway the sea, nor do we find an Ode to the Sand by Wordsworth, Keats or Shelley. Yet in a way we do… ~ Rune Graulund There is no clear way to define a desert. What is construed…

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For the Love of Trees…

By JoAnne Saldanha Have you ever had a perfectly normal, happy day ruined by something that left you so furious that you felt that the only way you could cope was to walk away from the situation, only to encounter something else that leaves you boiling with anger until you explode, spewing hurtful words that you had never meant to…

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Birdman of India Salim Ali

Publisher: Hachette IndiaAuthor: Zai Whitaker From being a trigger-happy airgun-toting nine-year-old boy to becoming one of the foremost bird scientists in the world, Sálim Ali did not follow a straight path. Somewhere along his adventures between India, Burma and Europe, he developed such a single-minded zeal for the study of feathered creatures that he spent all his time close to…

Alltime-favourite-Nature-Stories
Alltime favourite Nature Stories

Publisher: Penguin Random House IndiaAuthor: Ruskin Bond ‘I am lucky to be up here on this mountain, where the wind still hums in the deodars, the horse chestnuts fall in the autumn and the flycatchers flit among the ancient oaks.’ ALL-TIME FAVOURITE NATURE STORIES is a collection of twenty-five soulful and timeless tales about nature, featuring endearing characters and stunning illustrations.…