The results of the Pratham Books Retell, Remix and Rejoice contest 2016, Adult's Category are here! We know you've been waiting for the results for a really long time now and we're so, so sorry for the delay!  

Now, on to the results. This year we received a whopping 119 entries. 83 of those entries were in the Adult's Category (16 years and above) and we were pleased to see 2 Tamil stories and 2 Marathi Stories in the mix! You can see all the entries to the contest, including the Adult Category here.

CONGRATULATIONS to…

'Mr. Moon's New Friends' by Vibha Lohani and 'The Little Pup's Dream' by Rohini Lochan.

That’s right, we have two winners! Each will receive a printed copy of their winning story and a hamper of Pratham Books’ latest titles. Read on to find out who our judges were and what they had to say about the winning stories.

Arefa Tehsin spent her childhood treading the Aravali jungles with her naturalist father. As a child, she was often found trying to catch a snake or spin a yarn. She grew up to be a traveller, storyteller and was appointed the Hon. Wildlife Warden of Udaipur for a term. She is the author of several fiction and non-fiction books including The Elephant Bird. Her latest book is Wild in the Backyard published by Penguin. She writes columns and articles for various national dailies and magazines like The Hindu, Outlook Money, Deccan Herald, TerraGreen etc. A dreamer and rationalist, she is a serial traveller who wants to go on an endless journey starting with planet earth.

BAM! Books is an Instagram-led project which talks about children's and Young Adult books, curated by Bangalore-based writers Bijal Vachharajani and Maegan Dobson Sippy. Focusing largely on books with a South Asian context, BAM! aims to help parents, educators and young readers find books they can meaningfully connect to. Find out more at: https://www.instagram.com/BAM_Books/

What the judges had to say

BAM!Books

On Mr. Moon's New Friends: "A good story with strong rhymes in place." 

On The Little Pup's Dream:  "Nice simple couplets bring out the concept and a sweet resolution."

Arefa Tehsin

On Mr. Moon's New Friends: "The illustrations go very well with this poetic story about Jake who introduces the friendless moon to the creatures of the night."  

On The Little Pup's Dreams: "A pup looking for an escaped dream and his friends lending it a little bit of their magic to make it better! To know what the perfect dream is about, you'll have to read this rhythmic story right till the end."

You can find out who won the children's category over here.

A big thank you to our amazing judges for taking the time to read each entry and share their feedback and marking. Also, thanks to everyone who took part in the contest, your stories are now on StoryWeaver to share with friends, family and the entire world!

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Written by Shaoni Dasgupta, Assistant Editor at StoryWeaver

 

We are thrilled and proud to reach 20,000 storybooks on the StoryWeaver platform! When StoryWeaver was launched in September 2015 with 800 storybooks in 24 languages, we couldn't have predicted the tremendous reception the platform has received over the last five years - not just in India, but around the world.

Illustration by Sandhya Prabhat, for Today I Am written by Varsha Seshan, published by Pratham Books

We are extremely thankful to our amazing community, for helping us get to where we are today. It is your unwavering faith in our motto, and your help with strengthening our foundation through your stories and translations that has helped us achieve this milestone. Without your support and goodwill, we wouldn't be where we are! We are so excited to do what we do because of you and our brilliant pool of publisher and translator partners. Here's a shoutout to all of you for being amazing! You have joined hands to hold the base of the platform to make it what it is, and we couldn't be more thankful. 

Today, with 20,000 storybooks in 235 languages, StoryWeaver is truly a global repository of multilingual content. More than 1.5 billion children around the world are at home due to school closures, in an effort to control the COVID-19 outbreak. It’s a difficult time for everyone and the need for reading materials for children that can be accessed at home, is more urgent than ever. During this difficult time we hope you can Read At Home with StoryWeaver and continue to partner with us to bring joyful content to children the world over. 

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Amelia Bonea is a historian based at the University of Oxford and author of the book The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism, and the Politics of Reporting in Colonial India, c.1830-1900 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016). Originally from Romania, she has lived and worked in Japan, Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom. When not engaged in academic research, she likes to read and translate children’s literature, most recently on StoryWeaver.   

I was flattered when I was asked to contribute a post to the StoryWeaver blog to mark International Mother Language Day, celebrated on February 21st. The day also marks the conclusion of StoryWeaver's Freedom to Read Campaign launched in September last year. I was obviously flattered by the proposal, but I couldn’t help thinking that I was the wrong person for the job, since most of my adult life has been a move away from my mother tongue. These days, when I use Romanian, it is mostly to speak with members of my family on the phone or in occasional email conversations with friends, many of whom are themselves migrants scattered around the world.

‘It’s conservator, not conservativ’, my mother offers timidly, reminding me again that at some point over the last seventeen years, some invisible mechanism caused me to start translating words and expressions from English into Romanian, rather than the other way around. The lady who translates my birth certificate into English is bolder still: ‘Got you!’, she grins with the confidence of the professional, ‘It’s to write in Romanian, not to write down.’ I mumble some feeble excuse about having lived abroad for too long and head for the door with my pride visibly hurt. I am no language purist, but I care about how I speak, especially when I have ‘important’ business to conduct in my hometown.

I was born in communist Romania, during a time when bananas, chocolate and Coca Cola were prized commodities one learned to ration wisely so that they would last until uncle’s next visit home from university in Bucharest. I say Romania, but in fact I am more comfortable telling people that I am from Transylvania (not necessarily of Dracula and Bram Stoker fame, about which I came to know much later anyway, after I began my peregrinations abroad). As a child, I suspected that people from Bucharest were different: for one, they seemed to have easier access to foods we didn’t have and they kept referring to us as ‘provincials’; they also didn’t speak Romanian with a ‘Hungarian accent’, like we did. Not to be outdone, we reciprocated by feeling a tad superior to ‘those southerners’, among other things because of the dubious distinction of having once been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and thus exposed to the ‘civilizing’ influence of the West.

In any case, I grew up with a clear understanding that the Romanian with which the nation-state so eagerly wanted us to identify was not the same across the length and breadth of the country: people in the eastern province of Moldova were known to speak with a ‘sweet’ accent, while those in the south seemed to be excessively fond of the perfect simple tense. The Romanian I spoke at home was not the same my grandmother spoke in her village, peppered as it was with regionalisms whose meaning I tried hard to remember. And although my grandmother, a wonderful storyteller whose memory seemed to know no bounds, often populated my childhood with characters from her eventful life—she had lived through WWII as a child—sadly I find that my own memory falters when I try to remember some of the words she was using.   

Romanian was also not the only language I grew up with. In fact, it might be fair to say that I have two mother tongues, at least as far as hearing is concerned. There are many ethnic Hungarians living in Transylvania—as there once used to be Germans, my own aunt included—and Hungarian is one of the languages which reminds me of home, despite the fact that I only have a superficial knowledge of it. When I was in primary school, I made a pact with a Hungarian friend that we would teach one another our languages. We moved away and lost contact before I managed to learn how to speak, but it was not unusual to have ‘bilingual’ conversations with neighbours or shop assistants: people would ask questions in Hungarian and I would respond in Romanian or the other way around.

That’s how I learned that language wasn’t just speech, but a tool that could be used to play power games: one could use it to other people and by doing so, to stake a claim to a territory that did in fact belong to both interlocutors, not only to one or the other. I was reminded of these power games soon after the Revolution of December 1989, when our brief encounter with the Russian language as secondary school students was abruptly brought to an end by the new experiment with democracy and our teacher was made redundant. Russian fell out of favour practically overnight and we ended up studying French and English instead. All secondary school students were required to study two foreign languages at the time and we had no say as to which those two should be. What we knew was that studying English and French was ‘desirable’ as far as our future education and career prospects were concerned.

When I finally had a say in the matter, I decided to learn Japanese and moved to Japan to study for a university degree in Asian Area Studies. Once there, I became interested in the colonial history of South Asia and began to study Hindi as well. The big difference from my previous linguistic encounters was that these languages did not use the Roman alphabet and so they completely unsettled my ideas about the world: from a relatively small pool of 26-31 letters, I found myself thrown into a seemingly endless ocean of characters which I wasn’t always sure how they differed from each other. It was easier with Hindi, but I still can’t remember the order of the Devanagari script, which makes searching a word in a dictionary a time-consuming affair (and yes, I have the same problem in Japanese, but I console myself with the knowledge that some of my Japanese colleagues have the same problem with the Roman alphabet).

 

Much later, I also came to realize that these linguistics encounters have tweaked my brain in other, more subtle ways. I often find myself listening not only to what people say, but also to how they say it. I pay attention to their use of vocabulary and grammar. I read posters and billboards not necessarily because I am interested in the ads, but because I want to know what that character or expression means. Come to think of it, living abroad feels like a continuous language learning exercise. It gets tiring at times, but it is also exciting and enriching. Languages opened doors into worlds I didn’t know or knew little about. More than anything perhaps, learning languages has taught me to listen. Yoko Tawada, herself a straddler of worlds who lives in Germany and writes in German and Japanese, wrote in her book Where Europe Begins that, ‘Perhaps the ear is the organ of storytelling, not the mouth. Why else was the poison poured into the ear of Hamlet’s father rather than his mouth? To cut off a person from the world, you must first destroy not his mouth but his ear.’ I am reaching a stage in my life where I feel that I have come full circle and can now begin to translate some of the things I heard back into Romanian. And what better place to begin than with some of the best examples of storytelling out there, children’s books?

You can read Amelia's translations to Romanian on StoryWeaver here.

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