Saturday, 06 February 2010
20:00 - 21:00
David Sassoon Library Gardens, Kala Ghoda

What did India and the world read between 2000 and 2010? Boy wizards and vampires may have dominated the bestseller lists, but this was also the decade of Roberto Bolano, the return of the short story and the reworked spy thriller, the graphic novel and the forensic thriller. India’s translators discovered a new readership; pulp fiction in languages apart from English found countrywide fans. Though celebrity memoirs dominated the headlines, three surprising topics–climate change, food ethics and evolutionary biology–held sway over the charts. By the end of the decade, we were also debating how we would read and how reading would change, as ebook readers made an entrance.

A brief presentation celebrating and analysing the Decade of Books will be followed by a discussion between Ms Roy and critics Anita Roy and Sanjay Sipahimalani.

Nilanjana S Roy is a book reviewer, food writer and literary columnist with the Business Standard, and has worked extensively in the worlds of media and publishing. As chief editor from 2007-2009, she was part of the team that started up Tranquebar, a Chennai-and-Delhi based publishing house. She edited A Matter of Taste: The Penguin Book Of Indian Food Writing; some of her short stories have appeared in the Scholastic anthologies of science fiction, horror and fantasy writing for children. Her journalism has appeared in publications from Outlook to Biblio to The Hindu and Le Monde, and can be found online at Akhond of Swat.