Penguin Books-India Monday has launched its classic Hamish Hamilton imprint in the country with a collection of political essays, ‘Listening to Grasshoppers’ by Arundhati Roy and a novel, ‘The Wish Maker’ by Ali Sethi on contemporary Pakistan.

Hamish Hamilton will also publish Vikram Seth’s new novel ,’A Suitable Girl’, in 2013, a press statement issued by Penguin-Books India Monday said. The imprint, said the statement, is ‘one of the most prestigious in UK whose titles have won the Man Booker, Orange and the Whitbread awards in recent years’.

In India, Hamish Hamilton will publish a select list of literary fiction and non-fiction in hardback.

Some of the titles for 2009 include Sujit Saraf’s ‘The Confession of Sultana Daku’, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s ‘Way to Go’, Alain de Botton’s ‘The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work’, Rawi Hage’s ‘Cockroach’; John Updike’s ‘My Father’s Tears’, Noam Chomsky’s ‘Hopes and Prospects’, Zadie Smith’s ‘Changing My Mind’ and Paul Theroux’s ‘A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta’.

Hamish Hamilton was founded by the Scottish-American publisher Jamie Hamilton in London in 1931, in an era that saw a number of famous bookmakers like Jonathan Cape, Victor Gollancz and Michael Joseph set up publishing houses.

Hamilton used ‘Hamish’, the Celtic form of his first name James, to name his publishing house. Hamish Hamilton soon became one of Britain’s most distinguished literary houses publishing works by literary legends like Albert Camus, Raymond Chandler, Jean-Paul Sartre and R.K. Narayan.

Three of the most famous books of the 20th century, J.D. Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood,’ and Patrick Suskind’s crime thriller ‘Perfume’ were published by Hamish Hamilton.

Hamish Hamilton merged with the Penguin Group in 1986. In 2006, Hamish Hamilton authors won all the three major literary prizes in UK – Kiran Desai won the Man Booker while Zadie Smith bagged the Orange prize. Hilary Spurling, another Hamish Hamilton author, won the Whitbread literary prize.

Hamish Hamilton was launched in Canada in March 2009. India is the third foreign country after Canada and Australia to be able to publish titles under the imprint.