Monday, November 25, 2013

Kutti, Kozhakkattais and Bablu at Bookaroo


That's our Publishing Director, Shobha Viswanath telling the story of Kutti and the Mouse at The Palms at Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi. The 6th Bookaroo Festival of Children's Literature happened there last weekend.

She regaled the audience of over 50 kids and parents with the delicious tale of the seven siblings and a mouse. She also narrated the story of Bablu, the elephant and the mouse. 


Since Kutti and the Mouse is all about Kozhakkattais (Modaks, for those of you who do not know what Kozhakkattais are), Shobha called on a few young members of the audience to pronounce the word 'Kozhakkattai'(Go on, try saying the word out loud). Most of them who tried, failed and so Shobha invited the children to tell stories. The little storytellers spun yarns about seven-tailed mice, foxes, and more mice. And oh what a gala time they all had!

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Curious Sameer on Kirkus Reviews

There are so many exciting things happening at Karadi Tales this month! Kanyika Kini collected the SABA award for The Rumor in Madison, we received the gorgeous multilingual editions of The Rumor from Edition Orient, and our spectacular theatrical production Karadi Rhymes - Once Upon A Bak-Bak Tree premieres at the Chinmaya Heritage Centre, Chennai tomorrow! Added to this, two books from our Curious Sameer series have been reviewed by the acclaimed 'Kirkus Reviews'. 


Here's what they have to say about What Will I Be? and What Could It Be?, the first two books in the series written by Nandini Nayar and illustrated by Francesco Manetti:

"The bold, textured paintings and obvious love shown between parent and child will attract readers and entice them to return."
(On What Will I Be? Read the entire review here.)

"The wonderful relationship between mother and son is visualized in intense colors, striking perspectives and imagery straight out of children's creative moments."
(On What Could It Be? Read the entire review here.)

These books are now available on Amazon and on the Karadi Tales website

Friday, November 8, 2013

The Rumor goes places

We received the multilingual editions of our award-winning book, The Rumor from Edition Orient yesterday. The story of Baddbaddpur is now being told in German, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Tamil and Malayalam! Take a sneak-peek of the books, look how fantastic they are!




And guess what? You can also play Spot-the-Difference with these books! Go on, spot the differences in the following set of pictures.




Wednesday, November 6, 2013

The SABA experience

You do know that our book, The Rumor won the South Asia Book Award this year, don't you? The illustrator, Kanyika Kini went to Madison for the award ceremony and she sent us a happy little mail about her experience there. Read on.

I had a really lovely (and pretty hectic!) trip to Madison.

The book award has been instituted by the South Asia National Outreach Consortium. The award ceremony was attended by participants of the conference as well as teachers and librarians from schools in the area. Lynne Kelly, the author of the honour book, 'Chained' and I, who were the only ones attending the ceremony, were asked to give a 15 minute acceptance speech.
In my speech I spoke about how I went about the process of illustrating the story - gathering visual clues based on the geographical context and scenes from Indian village life, etc. - and the process of sketching and rendering the illustrations. I summed it up with the note from Anushka that I read in the end. 



The highlight of my trip was a visit to the Patrick Marsh Middle School on the previous day. I read out the story and talked to 3 different groups of 11 - 13 year old children about how I illustrated the book. I was amazed at how attentive they were, given their age group, and the kinds of questions they asked - it was great fun! The teacher who organized this visit sent a write up about it to their local online newspaper



So the rumor continues to spread... :)

Friday, November 1, 2013

Happy Diwali!

Karadi wishes you and your family a very, very, very happy Diwali!