Penguin Random House India acquires Duckbill Books

Penguin Random House India recently announced acquiring the book-publishing assets of Duckbill Books, a publisher for children and teens, run by Sayoni Basu and Anushka Ravishankar.

The acquisition includes titles and its backlist of non-fiction and fiction books across a broad range of categories. The Duckbill brand will be published within Penguin Random House India's children's publishing group division.

With this development, Penguin Random House India will have two exclusive imprints to publish books for children - Puffin and Duckbill.

"We are looking forward to taking the wonderful world of storytelling that Duckbill team has built to a wider audience. Children's publishing is one of our biggest assets, and as a company we would like to bring in good literary work that establishes new readers, generation after generation," Penguin said in a statement.

"We have had seven exciting years discovering new authors and experimenting with different kinds of books, but we have felt the challenges of being a very small house selling books in a very large world. With Penguin Random House India's amazing sales and marketing network, we hope Duckbill books will reach many new readers,' said Anushka Ravishankar, principal platypus, and Sayoni Basu, primary platypus, Duckbill Books. As per Penguin, Basu will join the company as Consulting Editor.

Established in 2012, Duckbill was recently awarded the coveted position of 'Publisher of the Year 2019' at the Publishing Next awards, and many of their books have won national and international awards, including South Asian Book Award, the Crossword Book Award, the Neev Award, the ComicCon Award, Peekabook, and the FICCI Publishing Awards.