India, July 25 -- The English-speaking world tends to be resistant to children's literature from other languages. "Serious" literature - whether in French, Russian, Spanish or Sanskrit - finds its way across language barriers, helped along by awards and prizes, but this genre has it harder.

How many young Indian readers have heard of Tetsuko Kuroyanagi and her book, Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window (1981)? It is the bestselling Japanese book of all time, and has been translated, among other languages, into Hindi, Bengali, Assamese, Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam.

Nikolai Nosov's 1980s stories about Dunno the Know-Nothing were very popular behind the Iron Curtain but are virtually unknown in the West, for both ideological and ling...