Some women from the countryside of Nepal have re-kindled the skills of reading and writing by translating Harry Potter into their native language.

 

Helen Sherpa, one among the five women who found the Sunbird Publishing House, told that this initiative was taken so that the children of Nepal will also have books for reading. She also told that the Nepalese children do not possess much books for reading like the children in Bangladesh and India.

 

 Since UNICEF was also keen on improving the learning skills of the women and children in Nepal, they started looking for organizations that would take a social marketing approach and produce books in Nepali and market them without looking for profit.

Sherpa along with four other women founded Sunbird to bring out books in Nepali for children and teenagers and take them to the target reader in the villages. Once the Maoist war came to an end in 2006, they started searching for something new. It was then the books of Harry Potter had become a rage among teenagers and youngsters. This topic caught the attention of this group with a letter which was sent by a Nepali boy to a newspaper wishing that harry Potter will be in Nepali.


Lucia de Vries wrote to J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, to ask for permission to publish the first Harry Potter book - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - in Nepali. Once they received a positive response, the book was translated into Nepali by February 2009.