First list of 165 authors announced for 9th Zee Jaipur Literature Festival

The Festival will be held at Diggi Palace Hotel in Jaipur from January 21 to 25, 2016

BestMediaInfo Bureau | Delhi | October 9, 2015

The Zee Jaipur Literature Festival has announced the names of 165 Indian and international authors set to contribute to the line-up for its 2016 event.

Taking place from January 21 to 25, 2016 at the Diggi Palace Hotel, the ninth edition of the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival will see leading authors of our times coming together in a global celebration of literature.

Headline names set to appear at the festival this year include Margaret Atwood, poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist; Ruskin Bond; Steve McCurry; Harvard historian Niall Ferguson; Stephen Fry; French economist Thomas Piketty; Bosnian American fiction writer Aleksandar Hemon; Israeli author and peace activist David Grossman; psychoanalyst and author Sudhir Kakar; Hindi poet and author Uday Prakash; Sahitya Akademi awardees from Assam, Rita Chowdhury and Dhrubajyoti Bora; and Gujarati poet and scholar SitanshuYashaschandra, among others.

The 2016 Festival will explores globally vital issues such as migration, privacy and navigating change, bringing together a range of expertise and perspectives on stage throughout the five days.

Homi Bhabha from the Mahindra Humanities Centre will curate a strand of sessions around the theme of privacy in the contemporary world. Contributors include British author and columnist Ben Macintyre. Frontline reporters will discuss conflict and its effect on the modern world with American reporter Dexter Filkins; foreign correspondent Christina Lamb; and CNN's national security analyst Peter Bergen.  Science communicator, children's author, journalist and novelist Lucy Hawking will speak of her extraordinary journey in transmitting the awe, wonder, and understanding of our universe to young readers.

The festival will celebrate the rich diversity of languages in South Asia. The Indian languages given voice in the programme so far include Assamese, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Malayalam, Marathi, Pahadi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Santhali, Tamil and Urdu with more to be announced soon.

The two-day Jaipur BookMark conference will be held alongside the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival at the Narain Niwas Palace Hotel on January 21 and 22. From self-publishing to e-books, digital content to distribution, this B2B platform will host both international and Indian publishing communities, providing them with a public forum to meet, talk business deals, listen to speakers from across the world and even sign contracts. Jaipur BookMark in 2016 will also turn the spotlight on translations and rights.

Namita Gokhale, writer, publisher and co-Director of the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival, said, “The Zee Jaipur Literature Festival is propelled by ideas and the excitement of real-time conversations. We bring together the finest minds from across the world and explore our changing times through sessions on economics, politics and the sciences. Yet we remain rooted in local culture and language, and our literary perspective is always from the grassroots upwards. The spreading Banyan tree of the Jaipur Literature Festival has found root and sustenance in its recent Southbank London and Boulder Colorado editions.”

William Dalrymple, writer and co-Director of the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival, added here, “Each year at Jaipur we try to produce a programme more remarkable than the year before, but this year has to be our most astonishing line-up ever. Among the international authors appearing this year, we present writers of genius as diverse as economist Thomas Picketty and humourist and polymath Stephen Fry. We will deeply delve into three areas of world literature that we have so far failed to explore – notably the novelists and poets of the Balkans, the Caribbean and Central America – while returning to examine eternal classics such as the work of Shakespeare, Proust and Andaal. We will explore a vast range of subjects from Neanderthals to Hedge Fund Managers; the bleak depths of depression to the heights of the Silk Road; universal myths of the Deluge to the literature of the Sandanistas; Jamaican rap and mediaeval mystic poetry; the agonies of Gaza and the pleasures of the Kama Sutra.”

The festival is a flagship event of Teamwork Arts, which produces 24 festivals around the world, led by Sanjoy K Roy and Sheuli Sethi.

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