Five of India’s top publishers deliberate on what lies ahead in 2023

Milee Ashwarya, publisher, Penguin Random House India

Milee Ashwarya

2023 is going to be an exciting year for Penguin Random House India. We have strong literary fiction, non-fiction, spirituality, self-help as well as business titles coming out this year. While I see business books, biography, political and current affairs, self-help and spirituality continue to rock the charts, I feel 2023 will also be a good year for fiction, particularly thrillers and literary fiction.

Karthika VK, publisher, Westland Books

Karthika VK

Non-fiction is likely to remain on top, with financial literacy, popular medicine and guru-speak selling widely. We have been seeing professionals transition from a snappy social media presence to authorship and popular podcasts and shows lending themselves to other forms, and I think this fluidity of forms is going to create a fresh impetus for both publishers and creators of content.

Popular history, fiction in translation from various Indian languages, celebrity memoirs and self-help, anthologies — I don’t think we are expecting to see any significant shifts in the pattern. These are the genres that have been gathering momentum over the last few years and publishers have been investing in discovering new writers as well as innovative marketing campaigns to drive these titles to the top of bestseller charts. The one change that I hope to see is the appearance of new voices and stories in the popular-fiction segment. Specifically, suspense, horror, crime located in less written-about cities and non-urban India by writers who are willing to experiment and reinvent the space for Indian readers.

Poulomi Chatterjee, publisher, HarperCollins

Poulomi Chatterjee

This year, readers will have a range of superb books to choose from. There will be something for everybody to enjoy. We will publish the much-awaited authoritative biography of Ratan Tata, as well as the autobiographies of Rani Mukerjee and Saif Ali Khan. There will also be some gripping true crime. Fiction readers will love new books by Riva Razdan, Tashan Mehta, Brinda Charry. They will also be treated to excellent debuts by stand-up star Kanan Gill (Acts of God), Huma Qureshi (Zeba), Devika Rage (Quarterlife), Siddharth Singh (a tribute to indie music in India Max Bulandi) and Nishanth Injam (The Best Possible Experience). We are also looking forward to our works in translation — Sahela Re by Mrinal Pande (translated from the Hindi by Priyanka Sarkar)
and short story collections by four modern masters from Tamil (Imayam), Rajasthani (Vijaydan Detha), Malayalam (Benyamin) and Kashmiri (H.K. Kaul).

Renuka Chatterjee, vice president, publishing, Speaking Tiger

Renuka Chatterjee

In 2023, we’re looking forward to publishing Nilanjan Choudhury’s novel, Song of the Golden Sparrow – a satire on India from 1947 till the present, which is hilarious, subversive and moving in equal measure. The Pledge: Adventures to Sada by Madhulika Liddle and filmmaker Kannan Iyer, the first in the Mandala Purana series, is an action-packed, edge-of-the-seat fantasy novel that we hope will soon be a web series. Our big non-fiction title will undoubtedly be A Lucky Man – the memoirs of the legendary Mark Tully.

There may be more interest in translations after Geetanjali Shree’s International Booker Prize win (in 2022), but most publishers, including us, have always had them on our lists. We have published several since we began in 2015, and have more lined up for 2023, including a translation
from Konkani of Jnanpith awardee Damodar Mauzo’s My Last Autobiography.

There is no doubt that social media is becoming increasingly important in driving interest in a book. Instagram and Twitter are instant and the more Tweets and posts a book gets, the more likely it is to get picked up. Especially by younger readers, who are mostly on their phones, not
browsing through the books section of a newspaper.