TRENDING OF 2020

TRENDING OF 2020

ECO BOOKS

For years, climate change activists and denialists have been fighting over its veracity. Now that the results are more evident than ever before, it is making itself felt in literature too. In his non-fiction book, The Great Derangement , Amitev Ghosh had argued for the representation of heaving, unpredictable nature and followed it up with The Gun Island , where nature shows a will of its own, apart from human design. Internatially, writers like Robert McFarlane are transforming the way we think of nature, taking us to the bowels, giving us the arboreal perspective, as the Pulitizer-winner novel, The Overstory, does as well. We can expect more eco books in coming years as scientists finish mapping the wood wide web - the underground network of microbes that connects trees, on the one hand, and we slide further away from nature, on the other.

GROWING UP

If children's literature makes you think of candies, rainbows and neat morals, you are lagging behind in your reading. Contemporary children's literature tackles politics, racial and sexual abuse, dysfunctional families, differently abled bodies. In India this year here was pops! by Balaji Venkatramanan, where a young boy talks about his trauma resulting from his parents separation. In Paro Anan's No Guns at my Son's Funeral, set in the conflict-ridden Kashmir Valley, violence is just a breath away. In the stunningly illustrated Lubna and Pebble by Wendy Meddour, young Lubna arrives at a refugee camp with her father and finds solace in a shiny, herd pebble.

BOOK OF SCREEN

the screen almost took over the written word this decade, with more and more novels being adapted into movies and webseries. how many of us have read The handmaid's tale or The other boleyn Girl? If we visualise red-clad women whenever there's a mention of The Handmaid's Tale, it's all because of the webseries, which is arguably more popular than the novel. The netflix adaptation of Vikrama Chandra's Secred games had people discussing it everywhere, from from the corner chai shack to the hip coffee shop. And now here''s no stopping the juggernaut, with authors writing or being commissioned to write specifically with screen adaptation in mind. 

GRAPHIC NOVELS

Gone are the days when graphic novels are considered niche. Author like Appupen, Amruta Patil, Sarnath Banerjee have been gaining more and more readers in India and then Nick Drnaso's Sabrina was longlisted for the 2018 booker, telling the world that the future of the novel is graphic. With their strong visual they create a greater impact than just the written words. The released Aranyaka by Amruta Patil and Devautt Pattanayak is creating waves and we can look forward of these books in the years to come.

TRANSLATIONS

The International Booker Prize has done much to bring translations to the forefront, with the award money of 50,000 bugs being split equally between author and translator since 2016. The image of Polish author Olga Tokarczuk sharing the stage with her translator, jennifer Croft, when they won the International Men Booker for Tokarczuk's Flights in 2018, become iconic. By that time, regional-language translations in India have already been gaining in population and now authors like perumal Murugan, K.R. Meera, Vivek Shanbhag, Manoranjan Byapari are being read widely in English, thanks to translators like Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Srinath Perur, Arunava Sinha, ministhy Nair. In the last one year, modern Tamil literature in translation, for instence, has gone global, with the rights of several books being bought by publishers in the U.S. and U.K.

SMALL PUBLISHERS

Olga Tokarczuk's  Booker win brought a little knowledge independent publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions, to the limelight. If i the U.K., the Small Publisher, Seagull Books, has been competing with giants like Penguin and HarperCollins since 1982. But it is only in the last decade that small publishers  have got the traction they have been waiting for. Navayana, Tara Books, yoda Press, Zubaan Books are now the go-to publishers for something different from the mainstream stuff.
This year, Sadia Abbas's The Empty Room, published by Zubaan, made it to the DSC shortlist : the small is the new big.