Congrats, Ritu, and Welcome!So delighted to have you here today, your book launch day for LION OF THE SKY! Happy to be here, Dionna. Thanks for inviting me! Inquiring minds want to know. How did you find your way to becoming a kidlit author? I have always loved to write, just for the joy of creating with words. As a child, I kept a secret diary and wrote letters to pen-pals, but what I loved most was writing poems whenever I took public transport. One day, I won a poetry competition in high school with a poem that I’d scribbled from the top deck of a moving double-decker bus and won a cash prize! I entered every writing competition I could after that and, to date, my poems have won me money, tickets to Paris, tickets to the cinema, furniture vouchers, and even a Kindle! Though I always seemed to find myself in bookstores and even asked for a typewriter for my twelfth birthday, it didn’t occur to me that writing was written in my future. Then one day, many years after I had become a high school English and Drama teacher…my 8-year-old daughter asked me a homework question... You’ve piqued my interest! What did she ask you, and how did her question lead to you writing LION OF THE SKY, your debut MG novel-in-verse? It was a homework question she needed help answering. Why do people migrate? I decided it was time to share with her our family's history. No matter how tragic, I believed she needed to know it. Share the history, please! Sure! It began in 1947 as India became independent from British rule, the subcontinent was divided into two countries—a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. The divide left millions of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims living in the "wrong" country. Hostilities grew. Mass killings ensued. Millions had to flee to safety, including my grandparents and parents, who survived the largest mass migration in world history. To help my daughter understand that dark, chaotic, and tumultuous time, I took her to the library. Though we found books about the Holocaust and the World Wars, we couldn’t find one children’s book about the Partition of India. My daughter accused me of making the whole thing up. It broke my heart. For days after our library visit, I thought about the fourteen million people who lost their homes and the one million who died. I decided to write the children’s book I couldn’t find for my daughter. I joined the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and in 2017 self-published a picture book about our family’s history, GOPE AND MEERA–A MIGRATION STORY. That's an incredible story, a sad slice of history, one many living in the United States may know little about. It's understandable you wanted your daughter to know about it. What does she think of her family history now? Now all three of my children feel like they’re experts on the Partition! They are very proud of their elders for the determination and resilience they showed in adapting to new cultures and languages, whilst making sacrifices so their children could thrive. My kids also feel empowered with a new understanding that adversity of all kinds can be overcome with courage and the right mindset. True this! (C) Tara Anand, taraanandart.com "Drawing from family history, Hemnani delivers a wrenching historical verse debut...Compelling stakes ratchet up the tension in this illuminating and harrowing story about displacement, grief, and hope." |
About MeI am a spinner of children's yarns, a weaver of nonfiction, and a forever-learner enrolled in the Institute of Imaginative Thinking. My kidlit work has appeared on the pages of Cricket, Spider, and Ladybug. As a work-for-hire author, I've written projects for Scholastic, Lerner, Capstone, Little, Brown and other educational publishers. My middle-grade, MAMA'S CHICKEN & DUMPLINGS, will be released by Margaret Ferguson Books, August 2024. I've been an SCBWI member since 2005, and a Children's Book Guild of Washington D.C. member since 2022, and am represented by Kelly Dyksterhouse and Copying, reposting, or otherwise republishing anything on this blog without permission is strictly prohibited.
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