Well, it was an app-y sort of day for Kate and Deb today. We’ve got a tight schedule to get our first apps out by September of this year, and, in the light of the very good responses we’ve had to the early material, we wanted to talk through bigger plans and opportunities for the future.
Then Kate went off to meet an agent at the Groucho Club… who didn’t turn up but for cast-iron reasons, and a rematch will be fixed. All was not lost, because she bumped into Bhavit Mehta coming out of a meeting about the DSC South Asian Literature Festival with Jon Slack of CANONtales. In fact, Kate keeps bumping into Bhav, and they’ve agreed that they really should meet up in a planned way. As well as being one of the organisers of the DSC South Asian Literature Festival, Bhav is the publisher of Saadhak Books, an independent list that publishes traditional stories for children from the Indian Subcontinent.
At Nosy Crow we appreciate all things corvid, so were pleased to see that Saadhak’s first book is Laghu, the Clever Crow (our picture today is taken from the cover art), which you can buy from Saadhak or Amazon. It’s a traditional story of crow-y cleverness written – or retold – by Bhav, and illustrated by Carol Liddiment (whose books Happy Birthday, Bear and Happy I’m a Hippo, were published by Alison Green Books, an imprint of Scholastic, while Kate was running Scholastic). It turns out that Laghu is “an unattractive but very intelligent crow”, who saves a flock of doves from being captured by a hunter. A story for our times, we think…
