Forest fables: Q&A with Nandana Dev Sen

Book: Mambi and the Forest Fire
Author: Nandana Dev Sen
Publisher: Puffin India
23 pages

How did you come to write Mambi...?

Mambi... grew out of my experience at a child shelter in Narendrapur near Kolkata. I was spending a day with the kids, encouraging them to express themselves through dance and song. But they were shy and wouldn't participate. That's when I made up Mambi and the children collaborated on the story. We decided there should be a dangerous situation, the children decided it would be a fire and so on. It was amazing.

Why children's books?

I believe children's books have a tremendous capacity to change the way a child looks at the world. I have always been drawn to the way fantasy enters a child's world. I want my books to be fun, and yet be about issues that a child should be aware of at an early age.

Were you an avid reader as a child? What did you read?

We didn't have the iPad growing up and the TV was seen as a corrupting influence in my family. So my whole world was the books I was surrounded by. I read indiscriminately – children's books, but also a lot of adult literature. I can never stop reading Aboltabol, Hajabarolo (collections of nonsense poetry in Bengali by Sukumar Roy) and Alice in Wonderland.

Did your father (Nobel laureate Amartya Sen) read to you as a child?

My father is a very inventive person and so is my mother (Sahitya Akademi award-winning Bengali litterateur Nabaneeta Deb Sen). My father would make up stories.

Are you working on any other books?

Mambi... is to be a series and I have several stories planned. There will be one learning to share through understanding hunger; another on sustainable development goals (SDGs), with illustrators from 17 countries representing each goal. It's important for a child to understand how important it is to end to poverty, that not everyone lives in the same fortunate circumstances, that boys and girls are the same and that education and health are important for everybody. Another book, Kangaroo Kisses, is about a child who does not want to go to sleep. It came out of my experiences with my niece, who's just turned six and never ever wants to go to bed.

What about films?

I've written a screenplay set in the world of cinema, politics and journalism in Mumbai, which is now in the pre-production stage. I am also supposed to develop the script as a novel for (literary agent) Andrew Wiley. And I'm working on a book on three generations of rule-defying Bengali women.