World Book and Copyright Day 2023: Popular Indian authors on the joy of reading | The Times of India

Sharing her earliest reading memory, author Kiran Manral said, “My father would ‘read’ to me every evening before bedtime from picture books, when I was very young. I didn’t even know the alphabet back then, but him reading the books over and over made the words stick in my head and soon I was ‘reading’ the books with him. I remember a picture book of two children who lived in a seaside town, finding an injured dolphin, nursing it back to health and setting it back into the ocean. I don’t remember the title of the book or further details, but even today, almost 50 years later, I remember the illustrations, the picture-perfect seaside town, the pony tails of the girl and the happy smile of the dolphin as it went back into the sea. Perhaps that was my first introduction towards ecological awareness and sensitivity towards all life on the planet.”

Speaking of the stories that had stayed with her and probably initiated her love for dark, twisted tales, she said, “When I was a child my father bought me a big, hardcover illustrated version of ‘Grimm’s Fairy Tales’. It was gruesome, grim and really scary. The illustrations were exquisite and transported me to another world, a world that I could only further imagine using the illustrations as a touch point. There were so very many strange stories in that book, stories that aren’t popular and known. ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘The Goose Girl’, ‘The Juniper Tree’ and more. The tales were not something I would honestly recommend you give a child to read, given the gore, the horror, the witches, the amputations, the cannibalism. I think I got my love for horror and twisted tales from that book, and it is a love that has endured down the years.”