The announcement of the Children’s Booker Prize in October 2025 generated excitement across the global children’s publishing community. In India, it was accompanied by a quieter question: could a children’s book published here ever find a place on the list? For that to happen, it would first need to cross a major hurdle – travel West, find a publisher in the UK and enter a book market where Indian children’s literature remains largely invisible.
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English literature for children continues to travel overwhelmingly in one direction: from the UK and the US to the rest of the world, including India. Indian bookstores usually have an extensive collection of children’s titles from the West, and bestsellers are mostly by foreign authors. Meanwhile, barring works by Sudha Murty and Ruskin Bond, a swiftly growing body of Indian children’s writing yearns for greater visibility, even at home.
India, UK, and beyond
Having worked in Indian children’s publishing for over a decade, this imbalance had long concerned me. In 2022, quite serendipitously, I found myself discussing it with Alexia Casale, Course leader of the MA Writing for Young People Programme at Bath Spa University (BSU) in the UK. Despite working closely with children’s books in our countries, we realised just how little we...