Children’s authors featured at SALA 2025 (image source: IC on Canva)
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Children’s authors featured at SALA 2025 (image source: IC on Canva)
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Children’s authors featured at SALA 2025 (image source: IC on Canva)” data-image-caption=”
Children’s authors featured at SALA 2025 (image source: IC on Canva)
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Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Stepping into a conversation with three extraordinary writers – Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan, Jyoti Rajan Gopal, and Padma Venkatraman for the South Asian Literature and Arts Festival is an exciting day on the calendar for me, a first-time children’s author- and I’ve starred Sunday, Sep 14 with a neon star on my table top planner.
Each of these established writers brings a unique voice to children’s literature, but what connects them is their knowing that stories can create belonging, give courage, and spark laughter.
Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan, whose most recent work, Let’s Use Our Words, turns wordplay into an adventure. She told me how she grew up in a family where books and newspapers were as part of life as breakfast. “I grew up in an era where we had far fewer distractions than what youngsters have to contend with today, so it was easy to turn to books,” she said. “My father was a ‘newspaper man,’ and we subscribed to many in our home. The reading habit and conversations about what we had discovered in our readings began early.”
For Srinivasan, words were not just read, but performed, heard, and felt.
“The sound of words was my particular forte. I still read aloud everything I write before I submit to publishers,” said Shobha, who is also a biographer and voice-over artist.
If Srinivasan’s path was paved with language at home, Jyoti Rajan Gopal’s writing was shaped by life between cultures. “Being a third culture kid provided me with the unique gift of being a global citizen,” she reflected. “Yet it also created many moments of alienation and feelings of displacement, and I know that bleeds into my writing.”
Gopal is herself a kindergarten teacher and educator. Her prolific picture books, whose latest colourful offering is titled Over in The Mangroves, tenderly touch on themes of belonging and identity, our environment, and the delicate thresholds of childhood itself. “Much of my writing comes from this place, which is why I think I write about people finding community and belonging, about accepting that they straddle worlds and finding joy and possibilities in that.”
As an immigrant myself, I found her words stirring.
Then there is the wonderful Padma Venkatraman, whose journey to becoming a celebrated children’s author began with a love of both mathematics and language. “I always loved words. But I also loved mathematics. In a way, the two aren’t that different for me. Music is a mathematical art, after all, and literature, at its best, is music,” she explained.
Growing up in India, Venkatraman felt strongly about independence, financial security, and making groundbreaking choices as a woman. Oceanography seemed like a perfect fit as it gave her a career rooted in science, the outdoors, and her environmental passion. But writing never left her side. Venkatraman’s middle-grade novel Safe Harbor is a touching tale of how a lost seal puppy helps a young girl cope with being uprooted from her home to a new world. “When my novels took off, nearly 20 years ago, I realized there was a lot to be done in the field of children’s literature, especially to increase representation. Literary success allowed me to become a full-time author and to help other authors of color, including many other desi voices.”
Listening to these three women share their stories, I felt a renewed sense of wonder at the ways childhood shapes us and how stories shape our childhood.
The three exceptional writers Jyoti Rajan Gopal, Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan, and Padma Venkatraman will come together on Sep 14 at the South Asian Literature and Arts Festival for an afternoon panel titled Tales that Transcend at Menlo College, Atherton. Get ready to be transported.
The post When Three Best-Selling Childrens’ Authors Speak, I Listen appeared first on India Currents.
