Great Indian Children’s Stories, edited by award-winning writer Stephen Alter, collects nine delightful short stories for older children by some of India’s foremost writers. The handpicked stories in this anthology include classics such as Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘The Kabuliwallah’, revolving around an unlikely friendship between a little Bengali girl and an Afghan man; Munshi Premchand’s ‘Idgah’, the heart-warming story of the gift a young boy gives to his grandmother on Eid; Mahasweta Devi’s ‘The Why-Why Girl’, the true story of a young girl from the Shabar community with an indomitable spirit; Ruskin Bond’s ‘The Blue Umbrella’, a tale of jealousy and understanding set in the pristine Garhwal hills; Khushwant Singh’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’, a poignant story about a young boy and his beloved grandmother; and Shashi Tharoor’s ‘The Boutique’, a sensitive account of an adolescent boy’s rite of passage to adulthood.
Stephen Alter is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Secret Sanctuary and The Cloudfarers. Wild Himalaya: A Natural History of the Greatest Mountain Range on Earth, his most recent work of non-fiction, received the 2020 Banff Mountain Book Award in the Mountain Environment and Natural History category. His memoir, Becoming a Mountain: Himalayan Journeys in Search of the Sacred and the Sublime, received the Kekoo Naoroji Award for Himalayan Literature. His most recent works of fiction include Birdwatching: A Novel and In the Jungles of the Night: A Novel about Jim Corbett, which was shortlisted for the DSC South Asian Literature Award.
Alter has taught at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, where he was director of the writing programme for seven years. Following this, he was writer-in-residence at MIT for ten years. Among the honours he has received are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the East West Centre in Hawaii, and the Banff Centre for Mountain Culture. He is also the founding director of the Mussoorie Mountain Festival.
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