2016 is back on everyone’s feed — here’s what literature looked like then

More traditional prizes reinforced a different tendency. The Man Booker Prize went to Paul Beatty for The Sellout, the first time an American author won the prize after eligibility rules were expanded. In the United States, Colson Whitehead won the National Book Award for The Underground Railroad, while Viet Thanh Nguyen received the Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer. These selections favored satire, formal experimentation, and nontraditional approaches to history.

Meanwhile, Back Home ….

One of the most widely discussed books of the year was An Era of Darkness by Shashi Tharoor, which expanded on a speech delivered at the Oxford Union arguing that Britain owed reparations to its former colonies.

In fiction, domestic authors dominated bestseller lists, often significantly outselling international titles. Writers such as Chetan Bhagat, Ravinder Singh, Savi Sharma, and Devdutt Pattanaik reached mass readerships through fiction, romance, and mythology-based nonfiction. These books circulated widely through urban and non-urban markets alike, operating largely outside international literary prestige systems.

One Indian Girl by Chetan Bhagat was among the year’s biggest sellers, reinforcing Bhagat’s position as the most commercially reliable author in the market. At the same time, Everyone Has a Story by Savi Sharma emerged as a notable anomaly: a debut novel that achieved record-breaking sales, driven largely by word of mouth rather than traditional marketing muscle. Preeti Shenoy’s It’s All in the Planets consolidated her status as one of the country’s most consistently read authors, while historical-commercial hybrids such as The Sialkot Saga by Ashwin Sanghi demonstrated the continued appetite for fast-paced fiction anchored in history and geopolitics.

No account of Indian publishing in 2016 can avoid the scale of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Its release became the single largest publishing event of the year, cutting across age groups and markets and delivering record-setting sales that buoyed several publishers through an otherwise uneven retail environment. Franchise publishing, tied closely to film releases, proved its continued commercial power.

Nonfiction performed just as robustly. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, published posthumously in January 2016, found a large and sustained readership in India, crossing medical memoir, philosophy, and literary nonfiction to become one of the most widely read books of the year.

In the self-help and spirituality category, Inner Engineering by Sadhguru performed strongly both in India and internationally, reflecting the global reach of Indian spiritual publishing. Mythology-based nonfiction continued its steady dominance, with titles by Devdutt Pattanaik maintaining high-volume sales across formats.

Short fiction and narrative nonfiction also found large audiences. The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad by Twinkle Khanna was one of the most visible short story collections of the year, while investigative nonfiction such as A Feast of Vultures by Josy Joseph demonstrated that rigorously reported political writing could also sustain strong sales.

Elena Ferrante’s identity in the spotlight

The year was also pockmarked by a widely criticised breach of literary privacy. (Source: amazon.in)

The year was also pockmarked by a widely criticised breach of literary privacy. Italian journalist Claudio Gatti published findings alleging that the pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante was in fact Anita Raja, a Rome-based translator for Edizioni E/O, Ferrante’s publisher.

Gatti based his claim on an examination of financial and real estate records. The reporting triggered a significant backlash from writers, critics, and readers, many of whom argued that Ferrante’s anonymity was an artistic choice and a right, not a mystery to be solved. The episode became one of the year’s most contentious literary controversies, crystallizing broader anxieties about exposure, authorship, and consent.

Literary adaptations

In 2016, written narratives moved confidently into film and television, often through reinterpretation rather than fidelity. The Handmaiden, directed by Park Chan-wook and adapted from Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, was widely cited as one of the year’s strongest films. By relocating and restructuring the novel, the adaptation sharpened its focus on power, desire, and complicity, and was frequently described as an improvement rather than a reduction.

The romantic drama Fitoor, directed by Abhishek Kapoor and starring Aditya Roy Kapur, Katrina Kaif, and Tabu. (Source: UTV)

In India, the romantic drama Fitoor, directed by Abhishek Kapoor and starring Aditya Roy Kapur, Katrina Kaif, and Tabu, was released . Loosely adapted from Great Expectations, the film relocated Dickens’s narrative to contemporary India.

Arrival, adapted from “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, demonstrated that idea-driven science fiction could succeed commercially without sacrificing complexity. The film became one of the most discussed literary adaptations of the year.

Other notable adaptations included Love & Friendship, based on Lady Susan by Jane Austen, and Queen of Katwe, adapted from Tim Crothers’s nonfiction account of a Ugandan chess prodigy. Television also entered the literary conversation with the pilot adaptation of I Love Dick, based on the novel by Chris Kraus.

Alongside these releases, several 2016 novels were widely discussed as candidates for adaptation, including Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter and The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan.