Some people write. Some create opportunities for people to write. Editor-publisher par excellence Karthika VK belongs to the second group. Still, she says, publishing was a happy accident. “I walked into Penguin Books India on a dare to myself that I could clear the copy test that was set for new entrants.
At the time, I was working on a PhD at JNU, after getting an MPhil from University of Hyderabad, and had no clear idea about what I wanted to do with my life.” But the test went well and Karthika “fell totally and irrevocably in love with publishing.”
She spent the next decade at Penguin, acquiring and editing fiction and non-fiction books and overseeing a nascent children’s publishing programme. In 2006, she moved to HarperCollins India as Publisher and Chief Editor, and went on to publish some of the brightest stars of the Indian literary firmament, like Aravind Adiga, Anita Nair, Manu Joseph and Rana Dasgupta. She also worked with commercially-successful writers such as S. Hussain Zaidi and Anuja Chauhan.
Apart from running a vibrant literary fiction list under the Fourth Estate imprint, Karthika also championed the cause of translations, Hindi publishing, poetry and graphic fiction. She created Harper Sport and went on to publish the autobiographies of Mary Kom, Sania Mirza and Shoaib Akhtar. Twenty years after stepping foot in publishing, Karthika says: “The pleasure of working with words, and with some of the finest and most creative minds of our time, keeps me as engaged and excited today as I was when I began my career.”