Over a conference call from Gurgaon, Anushka Ravishankar and Sayoni Basu, founders and primary platypuses at Duckbill Books, are being rather polite, asking each other to begin the conversation about launching the publishing house last year. They sure have a lot to tell. Duckbill, after all, is not an imprint of Westland Books, but an independent publishing house for children formed in partnership with the latter in July 2012.u00a0It is Basu who says she’ll go first, then. “We had been working with children’s publishing for many years and after a while, we realised that we weren’t really getting the time to work on the books we really wanted to.” adds Ravishankar adds, “There were so many stories and genres we wanted to read. So, we decided to publish them ourselves.”

It may be too early to hope for an Indian JK Rowling to emerge, but things are definitely looking up for children and young adult (YA) books in India. Location courtesy/Mcubed library, Bandra. Pics/Pradeep Dhivar