Class 11 English Hornbill Book PDF (2026-27)
Hornbill is the NCERT textbook for Class 11 English Core. The 2026-27 reprint has six reading units, each a prose piece and most with a poem, followed by a writing-skills section on note-making, summarising, sub-titling, essays, letters and creative writing. Every chapter below opens as a separate PDF of the current NCERT book, and the full book is one download.
Download full Hornbill book PDF Contents and preface PDF
Class 11 English Hornbill Chapter-wise PDF
| Unit | Chapter and poem | |
|---|---|---|
| Unit 1 | The Portrait of a Lady (Khushwant Singh) + poem A Photograph (Shirley Toulson) Khushwant Singh’s memory of his grandmother, from village school days to her death; the poem looks at an old seaside photo of the poet’s mother. | |
| Unit 2 | “We’re Not Afraid to Die… if We Can All Be Together” (Gordon Cook and Alan East) A family’s round-the-world voyage on the yacht Wavewalker, and how they survived a giant wave in the southern Indian Ocean. | |
| Unit 3 | Discovering Tut: the Saga Continues (A.R. Williams) + poems The Laburnum Top (Ted Hughes) and The Voice of the Rain (Walt Whitman) The CT scan of Tutankhamun’s mummy and what it says about how the boy king lived and died. | |
| Unit 4 | The Ailing Planet: the Green Movement’s Role (Nani Palkhivala) + poem Childhood (Markus Natten) Why the Earth needs to be treated as a living system, with the World Commission’s idea of sustainable development. | |
| Unit 5 | The Adventure (Jayant Narlikar) Professor Gaitonde finds himself in a Bombay where the Marathas won the Battle of Panipat, a story built on catastrophe theory. | |
| Unit 6 | Silk Road (Nick Middleton) + poem Father to Son (Elizabeth Jennings) A journey across Tibet to Mount Kailash, through Darchen and the high passes, written as a travelogue. |
Hornbill Writing Skills PDF
The writing section at the end of Hornbill is what the Class 11 English writing questions are based on: notes and a summary of a passage, an article or essay, and formal letters such as letters to the editor and job applications.
| Writing skill | |
|---|---|
| 1. Note-making | |
| 2. Summarising | |
| 3. Sub-titling | |
| 4. Essay-writing | |
| 5. Letter-writing | |
| 6. Creative Writing |
Class 11 English Snapshots (Supplementary Reader) PDF
Snapshots is studied with Hornbill in Class 11 English Core. Its five chapters are two short stories, J.B. Priestley’s play Mother’s Day, an extract from A.J. Cronin’s novel The Citadel, and Vikram Seth’s poem about the king of Melon City. Full Snapshots PDF
| Chapter | |
|---|---|
| Chapter 1: The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse (William Saroyan) | |
| Chapter 2: The Address (Marga Minco) | |
| Chapter 3: Mother’s Day (J.B. Priestley) | |
| Chapter 4: Birth (A.J. Cronin) | |
| Chapter 5: The Tale of Melon City (Vikram Seth) |
Students taking English Elective use Woven Words instead; it is on the Class 11 English books page with Hornbill and Snapshots. Class 12 English Core does not use Hornbill: its books are Flamingo and Vistas, on the Class 12 English books page. Books for every Class 11 subject are on the NCERT Class 11 books page.