NEW DELHI: With an exciting line-up of eminent personalities including Michael Ondaatje, Rupi Kaur, and Anurag Kashyap, the Jaipur Literature Festival today announced its first list of 60 speakers for its 11th edition scheduled to begin from January 25 next year.
Touted as the ‘greatest literary show on earth’, the festival expects to host over 250 writers, thinkers, politicians, journalists and cultural icons from over 35 different nationalities at the Diggi Palace Hotel in Jaipur.
“This is a vintage year for the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival, with an amazing line up of international and Indian writers and multiple strands of thoughtfully curated sessions.
“A space to interrogate our changing times and to encounter poetry and the dreaming mind, the festival returns with its unique brand of magic, whimsy and intellectual rigour,” Namita Gokhale, writer, publisher and co-director of the JLF, said.
The festival will feature a line-up of speakers representing the major awards including the Nobel, Man Booker, Pulitzer, Padma Vibhusan and the Sahitya Akademi Award.
The literary event expects to host speakers representing over 15 Indian and more than 20 international languages.
The first list includes English novelist and author of the iconic Bridget Jones Diary, Helen Fielding; Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter from The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team Michael Rezendes; Amy Tan, author of the widely adapted book The Joy Luck Club; 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mohammad Yunus; and former president of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai.
Several eminent Indian personalities including Sahitya Akademi Award winner Mridula Garg; award-winning Indian film director-producer Anurag Kashyap; Indian art critic, art historian, Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan awardee, BN Goswamy; Indian classical dancer and Padma Vibhushan awardee Sonal Mansingh; Indian philanthropist and writer Sudha Murty.
“2018 may be the best Jaipur ever, fielding an unrivalled literary ‘First Eleven’ made up of star poets and acclaimed novelists, historians and biographers, thinkers and dreamers and scribblers and critics, genii and half the faculty of Harvard. It’s an astonishing line up and I can’t wait for the 25th of January to see it all become a reality,” William Dalrymple, writer, historian and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, said.
The literary extravaganza will come to an end on January 29. (AGENCIES)
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