Shoma Narayanan

Shoma was an only child, and grew up in a house full of books. While she spent every spare minute reading, she never thought of becoming a writer herself – she wanted to be a teacher just like her parents. As it happened, after doing an engineering degree and an MBA, she ended up working in a bank. A few years ago, she took up writing as a hobby and after winning a contest run by Harlequin (Mills and Boon), she became the first Indian author to be published by them globally. Her books have been translated into more than 10 languages including French, Italian, German and Hindi. She has also written two novels for Rupa Publications. Recently, she co-authored a kids’ book with Ravi Subramanian - “My First Book of Money” that introduces concepts around money and finance to pre-teens in as non-boring a way as possible. Shoma’s two kids go to BIS – Aditya is in the 10th, and Anousha is in the 5th.

Event Description: Characterising and observation in Literature
Pretty much everyone has a favourite character from a book or a movie - it could be Thor from the Marvel universe or Hazel from "The Fault in Our Stars" or Lord Voldemort - I even know a very young person whose favourite character is Captain Underpants. What makes us care about these characters? How does an author make an imaginary person seem more real than people we meet everyday? And why do we want to know 'what happens next' in the lives of mal-adjusted superheroes and sociopathic detectives? We'll discuss all this and a lot more in our session on creating fictional characters - maybe we'll even end up creating some characters of our own.

Top five book recommendations for middle schoolers:

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins
• Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding