Abhijita Gupta

AG

Photo: Press / family archive

During the long, still weeks of the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, when schools across India had closed and children were confined to their homes, most seven-year-olds were watching cartoons or pestering their parents for attention. Abhijita Gupta was writing a book. Not as a school project, not with a teacher guiding her hand, but alone — working through poems and short stories that had been forming in her mind since she was five years old, filling pages with words and then, because no illustrator seemed right, filling them with her own drawings too. The book that emerged from those lockdown months, "Happiness All Around," would make her the youngest published author in the world.

Abhijita came from literary inheritance. She is the third generation of the celebrated poet-writer family of Rashtrakavi Shri Maithilisharan Gupt and Santkavi Shri Siyaramsharan Gupt — a lineage of Hindi poets whose work is woven into the fabric of India's literary tradition. That inheritance did not simply bless Abhijita with access to language; it surrounded her from infancy with adults who took words seriously, who understood that writing was not merely a skill but a practice, a discipline, a form of attention to the world.

She began writing at five — full sentences, then paragraphs, then the first tentative drafts of poems that her parents recognised as genuinely her own voice rather than imitations of what she had heard. By the time she was seven and the pandemic had emptied her calendar, Abhijita had the raw material for a book and the determination to finish it. "Happiness All Around" contains ten poems and four short stories. The poems circle around themes she knew: parents, grandparents, nature, and friendship. The stories explore the same territory in prose. Every illustration was drawn by Abhijita herself, rendering the book not merely a written work but a complete creative act — words, narrative, and image all from the same seven-year-old mind and hand.

Finding a publisher willing to produce a book written and illustrated by a child proved harder than writing it. Abhijita's parents approached multiple publishers; most declined. Invincible Publisher eventually agreed, and on September 18, 2020, "Happiness All Around" was published. Within weeks, the International Book of Records had certified Abhijita as the youngest person in the world to publish a book of stories and poems with self-made illustrations. The India Book of Records recognised her as the youngest Indian author of poetry and prose. The Asia Book of Records awarded her the title of Grandmaster in Writing. Later, the UK Book of Records added its own recognition — four separate institutions certifying the same remarkable fact.

The records, though striking, were secondary to what happened next. Abhijita kept writing. In 2021, before she turned eight, she published her second book — a non-fiction work on the pandemic titled "We Will Surely Sustain," offering her perspective on COVID-19 and its effects on children. This second book set another world record: youngest author to achieve record certification for a non-fiction work. Her third book followed, and then a four-book deal — the first signed with an Indian child author — confirming that publishers now understood they were not dealing with a one-book curiosity but with a writer who had more to say than any single volume could hold.

In 2021, Abhijita was featured in "Mauka Hai," a T-Series patriotic song released before Indian Independence Day, alongside Neeraj Chopra (Olympic javelin gold medallist), Sonam Wangchuk, and P.V. Sindhu — a recognition that placed her among the most distinguished young achievers in the country. Her royalties from her books, reported at over ₹3 lakh by 2021, represented not just commercial success but something rarer: a reading public that had found her work and returned to it.

Abhijita Gupta is now in her early teens, enrolled in school in Ghaziabad, and by every available account still writing. The records accumulated before she was eight were the start, not the summit. India has a tradition of extraordinary young literary talent; Abhijita's place in that tradition was established with a pencil, during a pandemic, at a desk in her family home, before most people knew her name.