Literary exchanges: Lessons from making Indian children’s literature travel to the West

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.

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 knew about each other’s publishing landscapes – what kinds of children’s books were being written, published and read in our book markets? The absence of sustained cross-cultural dialogue around children’s books had narrowed our imaginative and professional horizons.

From this realisation emerged Literature across Borders (LaB), a transnational literary exchange programme we co-founded in 2023, to talk about the books being published for young readers in India, the UK and beyond, to learn from each other and use these learnings to nurture diverse reading cultures and publishing practices.

At the heart of LaB is the simple idea of pairing thematically related children’s and Young Adult (YA) books originally published in India and the UK, and inviting students at universities and schools in both countries to read and discuss them with each other online.

Children in India routinely read Western books rooted in foreign cultures. Yet a constant refrain I’ve heard about children’s literature published in India is that it’s “too Indian” to be relatable to young readers in the West. Far too many conversations around taking these books into the Western market have stalled because of this notion.

Petula Chaplin of the Petula Chaplin Rights Agency admits that rights sales are generally challenging in the saturated Western market and cultural differences do come in the way, with storylines being seen as “too specific to India”. The books that travel more easily tend to be illustrated in a recognisably European style or deal in more generalised themes. Implicit in this is a kind of judgement that some visual languages and narrative textures are more “global” than others and therein, more suitable for travelling.

LaB offers an opportunity to side-step such gatekeeping and actually witness what happens when readers overseas engage with children’s and YA literature rooted in India. Unfamiliarity is undoubtedly an initial challenge. Yet, once crossed, the pleasure of discovery often outweighs the discomfort of difference.

Among the first Indian books chosen for LaB was Siddhartha Sarma’s Year of the Weeds, a YA novel about Korok, a young boy from the Gond tribe and his community in the Niyamgiri hills of Odisha, who mount a formidable resistance against a powerful company determined to mine their land. It had been paired with Emma Rea’s My Name is River – both books exploring the human relationship with land. Even though Sarma’s story was set in an unknown world, it prompted students at BSU to think about their own culture and values through a different lens. They reflected on how modern Britain had lost the spiritual connection to land and wondered about creating characters in a European setting whose connection to their land was as spiritually and existentially rooted as those in Sarma’s story.

In 2025, LaB expanded into schools in the UK, the US and India. One of the books that the school students read was Shandana Minhas’ Survival Tips for Lunatics, a rib-tickling tale of two little boys who find themselves left alone at the Hingol National Park in Balochistan. We had paired it with Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures – both books feature children setting off on fantastical adventures. Laura Bridge, a school librarian in the UK, said that her students found Minhas’ book less formulaic than many domestic titles. They also pointed out how the race of the characters was not an issue in it. “Many UK-published books they had read with non-white characters, used those characters to illustrate issues of race or religion.”

For multiracial societies like Britain, diverse stories offer an important way of catering to the diversity of classrooms, and following the LaB interactions, Bridge has been determinedly looking for books from the subcontinent. “Intentional reading of international literature will help all our students to diversify their tastes, and will be especially rewarding for students who can finally see themselves represented not as tokens in a story, but as relatable characters that just happen to look like them.” However, she admits that sourcing quality books has been a challenge.

Back in India, reading the book pairs made library educator JoAnne Saldanha’s students notice differences in writing styles, acknowledge the authenticity and relatability of local literature and recognise the limits of their reading that had been dominated by Western narratives.

These reflections strengthened our belief that accessible and compelling storytelling speaks to all age groups and does not lose its power across geographies. In fact, it does more than represent other worlds – it sharpens readers’ understanding of their own. What it needs is greater exposure and an openness to reading unfamiliar texts not just as cultural curiosities, but as literary bridges to a wider world of thought and creativity.

Expanding exposure

It may be a simplistic question, but I wondered why “Indianness” is seen as a barrier in children’s books, when many distinctly Indian novels for adults, such as Ghachar Ghochar and Railsong, have successfully travelled West. Literary agent Shruti Debi, who represented both these books, feels that the children’s market is “a complex matrix of cultural references, age groupings, text weightage, illustrative styles” that calls for “demand creation”. Referring to the success of Japanese and South Korean literature, she notes how broader cultural aspects, such as cuisine, books being read in the home or school, tele-visual content, fertilise the demand for children’s literature of another place.

While creating cultural demand is beyond the scope of LaB, increasing exposure to foreign children’s literature – for readers as well as industry stakeholders – is an important aim of the project. Unless exposure expands, not only will travel remain uncommon, but even books that do travel may remain relatively obscure. For instance, even though Nilanjana Roy’s The Wildings had been acquired by Pushkin Children’s Books, participants in the UK read it for the first time through LaB. Charlotte Taylor from BSU was especially appreciative of the Audible version that brought the book alive with different voices and sounds.

Since 2024, LaB has also been hosting dialogues with authors of paired books as well as decision-makers involved in taking books into the hands of children. Many participants – including seasoned publishing professionals – have remarked that it is their first substantive conversation with someone working in Indian children’s publishing. Author-editor Matt Ralphs described such dialogues as “invaluable” ways of understanding different markets and finding new voices to work with.

Typically, literature travels from its country of origin to foreign markets in two main ways – either an international publisher buys rights to publish and sell a book in their market or an international distributor makes it available for sale abroad. This needs a dedicated framework and consistent effort from the children’s publishing industry. The ground reality, notwithstanding the encouraging exchanges we’ve had at LaB, is that such initiative doesn’t come forth strongly for Indian children’s literature.

A lot of negotiations take shape at international children’s trade fairs like the one in Bologna in Italy. However, India’s visibility at these venues remains largely modest and not as representative of the diversity of children’s publishing in the country. Richa Jha, Founder and Publisher at Pickle Yolk Books, who has been a regular visitor at these fairs, cites how countries like Latvia, with much smaller book industries, often have a more robust presence with well-informed representatives passionately advocating for their literature.

Translation and production grants for children’s books – popular tools used by many countries to propel their literature overseas – remain limited in India. One promising example, though, is the Tamil Nadu government’s global translation grant programme for Tamil literature that is promoted heavily during the Chennai International Book Fair and appears to have caught the eye of many foreign publishers.

Ironically, the largest children’s publishers in India are multinational companies headquartered in the West. While books published in the UK or the US by these publishers enter the local market seamlessly as imports, titles published by them in India rarely travel back with equal ease. This asymmetry reflects the skewed priorities within global publishing structures that shape what gets to circulate.

Sohini Mitra, Children’s and YA Publisher at Penguin Random House India, notes that imported Western titles often arrive with significant marketing muscle, global visibility, strong brand recall and premium packaging. Children are drawn to familiar series and characters, and price is rarely a barrier for such books. Indian children’s books, on the other hand, tend to lack comparable visibility and cater primarily to a price-sensitive domestic market. Sales, therefore, tend to be steady rather than spectacular for most local titles.

The need for travel

Regardless of the challenges, LaB has created an opportunity for some of India’s most resonant children’s and YA writing to reach more readers in the West. Books that speak of childhood in one of the most multicultural countries in the world, full of its own unique colours and complexities. The only limitation is that they need to be in English to be accessible to all participants.

Pairing the books with Western titles has come with the recognition that children everywhere witness love and loss in myriad forms and seek out hope, courage and kindness as they negotiate the world with little power and many vulnerabilities. In an increasingly divided world, it has been a joy to bring this unifying idea to more people through LaB.

When children’s literature travels and finds readers who engage with it meaningfully, it builds the foundations of a more inclusive reading culture not just for today, but also for tomorrow. The unfamiliar becomes less distant and assumptions about what feels ‘universal’ begin to soften. But creating this shift needs sustained acts of belief: adults prepared to disrupt homogenous reading choices by finding different voices and introducing them to children, publishers willing to look beyond the convenience of dominant cultural narratives in young people’s books, and institutions ready to fund circulation. LaB has offered a glimpse of what becomes possible when such belief is put into practice – not as token inclusion, but as a serious commitment to the richness of reading across cultures and continents.

Meghaa Gupta works in children’s publishing and also curates the Nature Writing for Children Programme at Azim Premji University. She is the author of widely-acclaimed books for young readers, including an award-winning history series on Independent India published by Penguin Random House. The most recent book in this series is Uncoded: A Technological History of Independent India.