2021, The Year That Was: How we realigned our goals with the new shape of things

Since March 2020, we (every person in every profession) have learnt to live with uncertainty, realign our goals and expectations with the new, ever-changing shape of things, in the times of Covid-19. Amongst editors and booksellers, there were debates all year long on how the publishing industry was changing and would continue to change and reflect the ravages of the pandemic. 

Our list at Simon & Schuster India is small, select and ambitious. We try to get a slice of the best from every genre, from sports to biographies and memoirs, from cinema to translations, from self-help to economics and politics, and, of course, fiction of every sort possible. 

2021 started on a note of desperate hope — have reading habits altered in the times of forced solitude? If things are returning to normal is there going to be a sudden happy boom in the industry? What genres are people more attracted to in these times? Can we look forward to forthcoming literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that reflect the turmoil of Covid-19 in new interesting ways?  

Our first book of this year, Yasser Usman’s poignant, page-turner of a biography of Guru Dutt, did very well, received good press and publicity, setting the right note for the year. Our other January book, An Educated Woman in Prostitution, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha, has done well too and is being translated into Hungarian now. This was soon followed by a quiet, evocative novel, Civil Lines by Radhika Swarup, and another translation, Ambai’s collection of short stories, A Red-Necked Green Bird, which is still getting lovely reviews.  

We were preparing for a slew of exciting new titles when the second wave of the pandemic set the country back with death and devastation that many will possibly never fully recover from. In June we published, rather fittingly, Age of Anxiety, with which we completed our Mindscape series on Mental Health. August onwards sales started picking up again — from Kaushik Basu’s A Policymaker’s Journal, which went into several reprints and received lots of attention from the media, to Mission Domination by Boria Majumdar and Kushan Mitra and the blockbuster Karna by Kevin Missal. 

Akash Kapur’s Better To Have Gone was published to international acclaim, and was equally successful in India. We also published the Indian edition of a timely, informative and entertaining popular science book, Infectious by Dr John Tregoning, which immediately caught media attention in this endless year of Covid-19. 

Finally, the last couple of months of 2021 were off to a great start with the publication of Pullela Gopichand’s Shuttler’s Flick, part-memoir, part self-help, thoughtful and wise, just what one needs in these times. A lovely collection of literary essays by Chandrahas Choudhury (My Country is Literature: Adventures in the Reading Life), a tender, charming novel by Saskya Jain (Geeta Rahman at Championship Point) and an anthology, the first-of-its-kind in India, of cat stories and essays by a host of writers, some famous, some not-so-famous, some unknown, but all rather fabulous — these are the books with which we will round off this year.

At a moment when carpe diem sounds like the best idea it is not easy to make forecasts for the coming year. However, we do have many books that we are looking forward to publishing in 2022. We open the year with Sudeep Chakravarti’s The Eastern Gate: War and Peace in Nagaland, Manipur and India’s Far East and Saikat Majumdar’s latest novel, The Middle Finger. An important and troubling book that will be coming soon in the mental health space is Life Interrupted: Understanding India’s Suicide Crisis. Sisterhood Economy by Shaili Chopra will be coming out on Women’s Day in March — a book that takes a much-needed look at the intersection of women and economics in India rather than the more common nexus of gender, society and culture. 

We have a couple of interesting history titles in 2022 as well — The Mauryas by Devika Rangachari and Forgotten Kings: The Story of the Hindu Shahi Dynasty by Changez Jan, whose great grandfather wasKhan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (also known as Frontier Gandhi), which puts him in a unique place to narrate this incredible story of a dynasty that ruled Afghanistan from the 9th to the 11th centuries AD. We are also looking forward to publishing TJS George’s Dismantling India, a compilation of essays — politicians and movie stars, criminals and classical musicians, industrialists and activists, the book is a veritable who’s who of the people who built our nation and those who are at the forefront of its fault lines today.

I believe internationally the publishing industry is booming. In India, too, we would like to believe that things are looking up. But we are anxious people now, burrowing in our comfort zones, not very much at ease in the big wide world. I can’t speak for the industry at large but at Simon & Schuster India, we are still unsure as the virus and its mutants continue to snap at our heels, but, yes, we are also mildly optimistic, hopeful that things will look up in the year that’s to come. Good luck to us and to all the writers and publishers out there — may 2022 be kind to all of us.