Source : The Indian Express
This year, the Jaipur Literature Festival will feature a spectacular line-up of speakers including Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter from The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team Michael Rezendes; Sahitya Akademi Award winner Mridula Garg; New York Times bestselling poet and illustrator Rupi Kaur, among others.
The Jaipur Literature Festival 2018 is scheduled to take place from January 25 – 29 , 2018 at the Diggi Palace Hotel, Jaipur, JLF organisers said on Tuesday (November 28). They also announced the first list of 60 speakers for 2018 edition. This year, the festival will welcome over 250 writers, thinkers, politicians, journalists and popular cultural icons of over 35 nationalities. It will feature a spectacular line-up of speakers representing major awards including the Nobel, Man Booker, Pulitzer, Padma Vibhushan and the Sahitya Akademi Award.
The first list of 60 speakers released include Akhil Sharma, award-winning writer and creative writing professor; Amy Tan, author of the widely adapted book The Joy Luck Club; award-winning Indian film director and producer Anurag Kashyap; Indian art critic, art historian, Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan awardee, BN Goswamy; former president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai; English novelist and author of the iconic Bridget Jones Diary, Helen Fielding; Man Booker winner and author of The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje; Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter from The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team Michael Rezendes; Sahitya Akademi Award winner Mridula Garg; 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mohammad Yunus, essayist and novelist Pico Iyer; New York Times bestselling poet and illustrator Rupi Kaur; Indian classical dancer and Padma Vibhushan awardee Sonal Mansingh; Indian philanthropist and writer Sudha Murty; Academy and Tony Award winning Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard; and Grammy Award winning Tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, among others.
Curtain raisers will be held in Mumbai at the Royal Opera House on Thursday, December 7 and at the Taj Mahal Hotel, Mansingh Road in New Delhi on Tuesday, December 12. Namita Gokhale, writer, publisher and co-director of the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival, says, “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.”
William Dalrymple, writer, historian and co-director of the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival, says, “2018 may be the best Jaipur ever, fielding an unrivaled 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.”
