The Fiction Collection: Twenty Years of Penguin India

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For some years now, it’s been happy season for books and publishing in India. But the most  enduring success story in English-language trade publishing in the country—indeed in all of Asia—began long before this. The present gold rush owes a great deal to the foresight of Penguin, easily the most prestigious global publisher, which made a home here when the world wasn’t yet in thrall to the Indian market. Penguin India began operating at a time when trade publishing in English was virtually unknown in the country. The company launched its local programme in 1987 with seven titles: two novels in English and one in translation from Bengali, two biographies, a travelogue and a book of poems. Two decades on, it publishes 200 new books annually across a wide range of genres. Along the way, it has published authors from every country in the Subcontinent. In 2005, with the launch of its Hindi list, Penguin became the first global publisher to publish in an Indian language other than English, and now releases over sixty titles every year in Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam and Urdu. When it was set up in a two-bedroom flat in New Delhi, Penguin India’s most valuable asset was a boardroom table made of teak, at which strategies were devised, contracts signed and commitments made. Today, the table is no longer listed among the company’s assets. Instead, it can boast the finest list of Indian authors (or authors of Indian origin) anywhere in the world. And the list keeps growing: among the long-admired names we’ll publish in the coming months are Kamala Markandaya, with her posthumous novel Bombay Tiger, and Amitav Ghosh, with his stunning new novel Sea of Poppies, the first in a trilogy. Penguin India’s publishing remains as vibrant and confidently eclectic as our first clutch of titles promised. Our best authors, our true wealth, have stayed with us through the years, and helped us bring the best in contemporary Indian and international literature to readers everywhere. These commemorative volumes of the finest writing we’ve published up to our twentieth year are dedicated to each one of them. Showcased here are authors who have topped best-seller charts in India and abroad, and won virtually every major literary prize, including the Nobel Prize, the Jnanpith Award, the Man Booker Prize, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. It is unlikely you will find a richer, more representative collection of writing from or about South Asia. Now, when virtually every major international trade publisher is present in India, the fastest-growing English-language publishing market in the world, Penguin India remains committed to the vision laid out on that teak table twenty years ago. It is a vision that has ensured that Penguin in India, as in the rest of the world, is the publisher of choice for the best writers and the most discerning readers. And this is exactly how things will be twenty years from now.