By Anushka Ravishankar

I did not discover nonsense so much as recognise it with a shout of joy when I was almost twenty years old. What a waste of two decades! Of course, I had read nonsense as a child. I’d read the wickedly funny poems in the Alice books by Lewis Carroll and I knew some of Edward Lear’s gently silly poems and limericks. But I had no idea that nonsense was a respected literary genre. (Well, sort of respected.)

By Gita Wolf and V. Geetha

Years later, when asked about Tara’s origins, Gita Wolf would say, “I didn’t really have a business plan, nor had I thought through all that publishing involved. As an avid child-reader fed on Anglo-Saxon books, it seemed to me that fun and adventure seemed to happen only to children in other places… and I wondered, why not right here?”

Nia Murphy & Maegan Dobson interview Anushka Ravishankar

More than 20 years after the publication of her first book, India’s acclaimed nonsense poet Anushka Ravishankar looks back at the collaborative process that led to the creation of her first few picture books for children.