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Shalini Singh
Shalini Singh

JLF 2017

Curtains raised on 10th edition of Jaipur Literature Festival

India's annual literary event that takes place every January completes a decade in 2017. To celebrate the 'birthday' and announce its programme, the upcoming Jaipur Literature festival held a curtain raiser in the capital on Tuesday, which was attended by authors, publishers and many of Delhi's glitterati. 

jlf

The themes for this year's festival, to be held from January 19-23, include freedom to dream: India at 70, the Magna Carta, translation and world literature, women and marginalised voices, Sanskrit and colonialism and the legacy of the Raj.

Around 30 languages will be represented from India and across the world, featuring authors such as Volga in Telugu, S.L. Bhyrappa and Vivek Shanbhag in Kannada, Kaajal Oza Vaidya in Gujarati, C.P. Deval and Hari Ram Meena in Rajasthani, Kanak Dixit and Binod Chaudhary in Nepali, Dhrubajyoti Bora in Assamese, Gulzar and Javed Akhtar in Urdu, Jatindra K. Nayak in Oriya, Naseem Shafaie and Neerja Mattoo in Kashmiri, Arunava Sinha and Radha Chakravarty in Bengali and Arshia Sattar, A.N.D. Haksar, and Roberto Calasso in Sanskrit. Writers in Hindi include Ajay Navaria, Anu Singh Choudhary, Manav Kaul, Mrinal Pande, Narendra Kohli and Yatindra Mishra.

International writers include Man Booker Prize winners Alan Hollinghurst and Richard Flanagan; NoViolet Bulawayo, the first black African woman to be shortlisted for the prize in 2013; two-time Academy Award nominee Sir David Hare, acclaimed poet Anne Waldman; poet-activist-teacher Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni; Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who predicted the 2008 global financial crisis; American journalist and Pulitzer prize-winning Dexter Filkins; Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker; Ha-Joon Chang whose books, including 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism and Economics: The User’s Guide which have been translated into 40 languages and published in 43 countries; and Linda Colley, award-winning writer-broadcaster who specialises in post-1700 British history.

“We live in times where the cycles of change are puzzling, often disruptive. Books are the answers to these puzzles, literature binds human stories, and contemplates the human situation. In an increasingly parochial and polarised world, literature helps us scale the walls. And translation is the tool that helps us access cultures and knowledge systems," said Namita Gokhale, co-director of the festival.

Keeping with the theme, the curtain-raiser was marked by an evening of dramatic reading by poet Arundhati Subramanium, soulful musical performance by Harpreet, a young Punjabi singer, and translated rendition by Kannada writer, H.S. Shivaprakash. Australia's high commissioner to India, Harinder Sidhu also announced JLF Melbourne, a pop-up edition of the festival in February. 

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Topics : #literature | #books

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