Look who's got it covered

Embroidery, art, metaphors and new minimalist styles. Indian novels are playing it bold and creative with their covers. And picking up prizes too

- Christalle Fernandes

"Twenty-five years ago, book cover design was barely an industry," says Bena Sareen. She is currently the consulting creative director at Aleph Book Company in Delhi. But when the millennium turned, she was Penguin India's first art director. It was a good time to be in publishing. In 1997, Arundhati Roy's The God Of Small Things won the Booker Prize. Kids and adults were delighting in the first magical adventures of Harry Potter. And the very first Crossword Book Award, India's first major prize for writers, was given out in 1998.

India was excited about English-language fiction. The only place to go was up, or uphill. "To research book cover visuals, one had to visit national museums, stand in line, and fill in forms for photos of the images one wanted," Sareen recalls. "The other option, if you were doing a cover for Ruskin Bond, was to ring up friends who had travelled to the hills, ask them to send images and pick something from them."

In the years since, publishers have tried every design trick to make promising writers stand out. See how some publishers still aim for the window display, even as we increasingly read on screens.

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