India gained independence from the British in 1947, and we’ve come a long way since then. Be it cricket or literature, we have been beating the English at their own game. On the occasion of Queen Elizabeth IIs Jubilee, a popular “Reads List” was published. Out of the many novels, guess what – seven of them were published by Indian authors! Not only that – many of them have won the International Booker Prize, a prize that is awarded for the best novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland in the given year. It may not exactly be the Nobel Prize, but in terms of prestige, it comes quite close.

Check out the list of the books, and check how many of them you yourself have read. And if you haven’t read any, maybe it’s time to add a couple of these to your reading list…

1) The Guide – RK Narayan (1958)

2) Sunlight on a Broken Column – Attia Hosain (1961)

3) The Nowhere Man – Kamala Markandaya (1972)

4) Clear Light of Day – Anita Desai (1980)

5) Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (1981)

6) The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy (1997)

7) The Blue Bedspread – Raj Kamal Jha (1999)