FINALLY! The results for Pratham Books’ Retell, Remix and Rejoice contest 2018 is here! A big thank you to all the participants for taking part, and being super patient with us as the judges read through each of your wonderful stories.

This year we received a whopping 115+ entries. We were pleased to see even more original language entries than previous years. We received 55 stories in English, 29 in Hindi, 14 in Marathi, 11 in Tamil and 6 stories in Kannada!

Our panel of judges were impressed with the quality of the stories submitted and the creativity of the authors. All 115 entries were read, re-read and then read once again by Pratham Books’ crack team of editors who have a deep and abiding love for children's picture books.

And now, on to the results! Drum roll please! This year, we have 3 winning finalists:

 

Each finalist will receive a gift hamper of books from Pratham Books and will have a one-on-one feedback session with a Pratham Books editor. One final story will then be chosen for illustration.

Here’s what our judges had to say about the finalists’ stories!

मेरी सबसे प्यारी वाली नानी  “You can never have enough grandmothers! The story was refreshing because of its different but quirky grandmothers. Each grandmother had something interesting to offer to her grandchild! It was lovely that the writer had placed no limitations on what women are capable of doing and enjoying with their family.”

What Did I Catch in the Garden? “The rambling, meandering way the protagonist finds her way towards an original poem was quite lovely!"

We Are A Family  “Inclusive, diverse, respectful of a child's curiosity - what’s not to love about this story?”

Congratulations to our finalists! You’ll be hearing from us shortly via email. 

Read all the Retell, Remix and Rejoice entries.

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This Children's Day, Pratham Education Foundation and StoryWeaver are delighted to announce their partnership to add to the repository of reading resources to help build foundational reading skills among young children. The announcement is the start of a process in which stories developed by teams from Pratham Education Foundation will be hosted on StoryWeaver. Having these storybooks under the CC BY 4.0 license on StoryWeaver makes them available to a larger audience worldwide, and the books are free to read, download and use. At the same time, these books will give the StoryWeaver community new stories to translate, giving children around the world access to more books in their own languages.

To kick off the collaboration, 50 stories from Pratham are being launched on StoryWeaver today.  These books will be part of StoryWeaver's new collection for Emergent Readers, which are storybooks with simple text, colourful illustrations and familiar words, to help introduce children to the #JoyOfReading! 

Explore the storybooks here:  https://bit.ly/38DUe25

While most of these 50 storybooks are in Hindi, the partnership aims at building a collection of 200 books in 11 Indian languages and English in the next two months, and scaling the repository to 1000 books in the coming months. The languages include Assamese, Bangla, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

The first 5 years of a child’s life  are crucial, with over 85% of brain development occurring at this stage. Fostering reading and development abilities at this stage has a positive impact on learning outcomes, and preparing children for school. At present, millions of children do not have access to quality Early Childhood Education. In keeping with United Nations’ SDG 4  - Quality Education for All, the National Education Policy 2020 has laid out a blueprint for the universal provisioning of quality early childhood development, care and education. The key priorities of the National Education Policy 2020 include the achievement of Foundational Literacy for all primary school students by 2025, and the creation of enjoyable, inspirational books for children.

Suzanne Singh, Chairperson, Pratham Books, says: ​ “Children’s Day serves as an important reminder of our responsibilities towards nurturing our children to achieve their potential. We are delighted to partner with Pratham and leverage the power of open licensing, to address the inequity in the availability of storybooks for emergent readers. Pratham’s vast experience with early learning is reflected in the content produced by them and we are delighted to make this content available to the rest of the world so that children have the opportunity to learn to read, and read to learn.”

Rukmini Banerji, Chief Executive Officer, Pratham Education Foundation, says: “We, at Pratham, have long believed that for learning to read and for loving to read, children must have easy access to a wide variety of stories at all times. We love stories and use stories extensively in our programs. Since StoryWeaver was born, we have been big admirers and users of StoryWeaver. We are also producers of stories. Every year we also generate a lot of stories ourselves in many regional languages for use in our own programs. Thus, the new partnership with StoryWeaver enables us to share our stories with a wider audience and to add to the growing repository of reading material that is available to children in India and across the world. Our collaboration with StoryWeaver is yet another step towards the dream of every child in India reading a story every day.”

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The result for Pratham Books’ Retell, Remix and Rejoice contest 2017 is finally here! A big thank you to all the participants for taking part, and being super patient with us as the judges read through each of your wonderful stories.

This year, Retell, Remix and Rejoice was in a slightly different avatar as we asked our community to weave level 1 and 2 stories around certain themes. We received 66 entries: 39 in English, 26 in Hindi and 1 Tamil story. This was the most number of Hindi stories we ever received for the contest.

Drum roll please

And now, on to the results! This year, we have 3 winning finalists:

Each finalist will receive a gift hamper of books from Pratham Books and will get one hour with a Pratham Books editor, who will share their editorial feedback on the story. One final story will then be chosen for re-illustration.

Meet the judges

Rajesh Khar is a senior editor at Pratham Books. Through these years, he has not only edited and translated books but also coordinated lit fests like Bookaroo, JLF, Samanvay, New Delhi World Book Fairs and joined hands with organisations like Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, CBSE, NEOR by NCERT and a host of non-profits. He has been supervising books in many Northern & Eastern Indian languages and also have had opportunity to be a part of the Adikahaani Series and the Urdu programme. His interests are music, classical performing arts, casual writing, theater and film making. He loves spending time with children and young people and basically has a lot of fun in whatever he does.

This is what Rajesh had to say about the entries this year: “I enjoyed reading all the stories very much and while reading the thoughts that came into my mind were a mixed lot - sometimes those of pleasure, at times a little sadness. Why sadness? Well, in some of the stories I wished that the authors had sustained that creative energy till the last word. Animal Symphony was a lovely story that highlighted the need to provide children ample opportunities to bond with nature alone.  My Grandma Has a Tail and Toot'ta Tara both displayed out-of-the-box thinking and creativity. Joy, happiness and love together make every childhood memorable and create individual secure little universes. This subconsciously builds the foundations for a happy and healthy future life. I was happily reminded of this while reading A Special Journey.”

Our second judge, Kanchan Banerjee is a Managing Trustee of Akshara Foundation where she develops strategy and designs learning material. She founded Jyoshika, an NGO which works for the enrichments of children's learning in their early years. She enjoys writing for children. Under a UNICEF projects she developed graded readers in Kannada for children in Karnataka and in Hindi for children in Chattisgarh. She had this to say about the entries received this year:  “It was delightful to read a variety of imaginative entries. Truly, writers can fire the creativity of young children and move them to a different space away from moralizing.”

Congratulations to the winners. You’ll be hearing from us shortly about your one on one session with a Pratham Books editor.

Read all the Retell, Remix and Rejoice entries.

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