Press Release

HarperCollins India and The Himalayan Writing Retreat Present The First Draft Club

HarperCollins and The Himalayan Writing Retreat

are pleased to announce a collaboration

The First Draft Club

A forum where authors and industry experts will speak to and interact with aspiring writers on ways to improve their work

The First Draft Club is a charitable initiative that assists many writers in completing their first drafts by providing community support and guidance.

It also encourages all participants to develop the habit of reading. The proceeds from this initiative go to the students of Chirag, a charitable NGO-run school.

The FDC is completely charitable, and the requested donation goes directly to the Chirag School.

Udayan Mitra, Executive Publisher at HarperCollins India, says: “At HarperCollins, our motto is simple: READ. For all of us to be able to read more, we need more writers – and we need them to write more and more. I’m hugely appreciative of the work The Himalayan Writing Retreat is doing in enabling aspiring writers and helping them to shape their work. We’re very pleased to be able to partner on the First Draft Club this May–we’ll have some of our lead authors and a very experienced publishing editor participating in the sessions.”

“The Himalayan Writing Retreat has hosted the First Draft Club (FDC) since 2020, and we are thrilled that HarperCollins has agreed to host the FDC in May 2023. HarperCollins will be bringing authors and editors to the FDC to help participants in writing better. Every Sunday in May, HarperCollins experts will meet with FDC participants and guide them through different facets of writing, editing, and publishing,” says Chetan Mahajan, Co-founder – The Himalayan Writing Retreat.

Below is the schedule of the authors who will be a part of the FDC in May 2023:

May 7: Anukriti Upadhyay, author of The Blue Women, Kintsugi, Daura and Bhaunri

May 14: Tripurdaman Singh, author of Nehru: The Debates that Defined India

May 21: Swati Chopra, Associate Publisher, Non-Fiction, HarperCollins India

May 28: Aakash Singh Rathore, author of Becoming Babasaheb: The Life and Times of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar 

For more details, click on the link here:  https://www.himalayanwritingretreat.com/first-draft-club-online-writing-community-live/

Application form: https://forms.gle/peiMyCRLxp68Phze8

About HarperCollins:

At HarperCollins Publishers India, we believe in telling the best stories and in ensuring that these stories reach a wide readership. We have had the pleasure of publishing some of the finest writers from the Indian subcontinent and around the world, publishing approximately 250 new books every year, with a print and digital catalogue of more than 2000 titles across 10 imprints and an array of genres. Essentially, our catalogue has a book for every reader.

Our authors have won a phenomenal range of literary awards including the Booker Prize, JCB Prize, DSC Prize, New India Foundation Award, Atta

Galatta Prize, Shakti Bhatt Prize, Gourmand Cookbook Award, Publishing Next Awards, Tata Literature Live! Award, Sushila Devi Award, Neev Awards, Gaja Business Book Awards, Ekamra Sports literature Awards, JK Auther Women Awards, Crossword Book Award, Sahitya Akademi Award and the Jnanpith Award

We’re the proud publishers of some of the finest writers in the world including APJ Abdul Kalam, Aanchal Malhotra, Agatha Christie, Amish Tripathi, Amitav Ghosh, Anand Neelkantan, Anuja Chauhan, Ashwin Sanghi, Chetan Bhagat, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Devdutt Pattanaik, Janice Pariat, Jay Shetty, Jeff Keller, Jeffrey Archer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Madhuri Vijay, Manu Pillai, Mark Manson, Paulo Coelho, Preeti Shenoy, Raghuram Rajan, Ramachandra Guha, Ravi Subramanian, Ravinder Singh, Rhonda Byrne, Ruskin Bond, S Hareesh, S Hussain Zaidi, Sadhguru, Savi Sharma, Siddhartha Mukherjee and Sudha Murty, to name just a few.

HarperCollins India is also the publisher of The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, winner of the Booker Prize 2008 and Girl in White Cotton by Avni Doshi, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020, and is the recipient of five Publisher of the Year Awards – In 2021 and 2015 at the Publishing Next Industry Awards, and in 2021, 2018, 2016 and 2022 at Tata Literature Live!

HarperCollins India also represents some of the finest publishers in the world including Harvard University Press, Gallup Press, Lonely Planet, Farshore, Allison & Busby Publishers, Hinkler, Ulysses Press, Red Weil Weiser, Welbeck, Oneworld and Gallup, Children’s publishers Bonnier, Usborne, Dover, National Geographic Children and Independent Indian publishers Navayana, Speaking Tiger and Juggernaut Books.

About the Himalayan Writing Retreat:

The Himalayan Writing Retreat is a passion project started by two authors. A residential getaway in a serene Himalayan village, the retreat attracts writers from the world over. The retreat hosts 3–4-day long workshops for domestic participants, and 10-day long retreats for international participants. The Himalayan Writing Retreat is hosts for a literary residency run by the French Government. The retreat offers many of its courses online as well.

The courses offered include Creative writing, Poetry writing, scriptwriting, blogging, article writing, short-story writing, Translation, Story-telling and many others. The award-winning faculty-members are experts in their fields. These include Anu Singh Choudhary, Arunava Sinha, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Divya Prakash Dubey, Erika Krouse, Geeta Ramanujam, Kritika Pandey, Rochelle Potkar, Sumit Bansal and so on.

When not hosting courses or workshops, the retreat offers respite to writers looking to escape the urban pressure-cooker for serenity and inspiration.

Writers from this community have published 45 books and won many awards and accolades, and these continue to grow.

Press contacts:

Himalayan Writing Retreat: info@himalayanwritingretreat.com / +91-73035-16665.

HarperCollins: Aman Arora at aman.arora@harpercollins.co.in / +91 97180-58893

harperbroadcast

Recent Posts

Read an Excerpt from ‘The Keeper of Desolation’

Surreal yet gritty, violent yet poetic – such is the world of Chandan Pandey’s fiction.…

7 months ago

Mitali Mukherjee’s Favourite Books

From books on financial frauds to a graphic novel based in Gaza, Mitali Mukherjee reading…

7 months ago

Between the Lines with Mitali Mukherjee

Mitali Mukherjee's chilling and unputdownable new book Crypto Crimes traces the murky underbelly of the…

7 months ago

Mastering Money: Essential Reads in Finance and Business Books

Hey there readers! For today’s blog we have brought you a collection of finance and…

7 months ago

Explore The World of YA Novels Perfect for Teens

Hi readers! In this week’s blog we have some Young Adult recommendations perfect for teens.…

7 months ago

India’s #1 crime writer S. Hussain Zaidi is back with a riveting thriller – The Black Orphan

is proud to announce the release of THE BLACK ORPHAN   Inspired by true events,…

7 months ago