TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27, 2005 09:20:26 AM]
WASHINGTON: A nerdy, teenage Indian-American girl goes to an Ivy League school, feels out of sync with her peers, so goes out and does what she thinks 'regular' American girls do — get drunk, kiss boys, dance on the table.
Happens all the time, hey? Except, Kaavya Viswanathan, a freshman at Harvard, used this storyline for an upcoming literary debut that has won her a staggering $500,000 (Rs 2.2 crore) in advance from the prestigious American publishing house Little Brown & Company.
" How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got In ," is expected to be published next spring, but the literary and publishing world is already in a tizzy over what is arguably the largest payout ever paid to a teenage, unpublished writer. The sum is for a two-book deal.
According to an account in the New York Sun, which first reported the story, Kaavya, who is studying to be an investment banker, always had a literary bent and was working on a novel during her vacations.
Kaavya Viswanathan, the only daughter of Viswanathan Rajaraman and Mary Sundaram, both New Jersey-based physicians,.wonders why she had not highlighted the fact that she was writing a novel in her resume when she was applying for Harvard, the head of Ivywise, an agency that helps students prepare for college admissions.
The head of the agency, Dr Elizabeth Cohen, asked for a sample of her work.
She was so struck by what she read that she called her own agent at William Morris (an agency that incidentally also handles publicity for Aishwarya Rai), who in turn passed it on to the literary agent.
The agent shopped the draft chapters around till Little Brown came up with the staggering offer.
"I still cannot believe this. I never expected this would happen,'' Kaavya told Pranoy Gupte, a former columnist of Newsweek who wrote an exclusive account of this literary adventure for The New York Sun.
"I had only vaguely thought of becoming a writer. But a book contract?
>From a major publisher? This is so incredibly unbelievable,'' she
said.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1089776.cms