The five-day-event which will open on January 19 next year, will be hosted at the historic Diggi Palace in Jaipur with the theme, “The Freedom to Dream: India at 70”.
The founders offered a sneak peek into what the literary celebration would be like last evening, at the opening ceremony at Taj Mansigh here.
“We started the festival with two aims in our mind – to bring the world to Jaipur and to take the great Indian literature to the world. I am happy that we were able to achieve what we set out for ourselves 10 years back,” William Dalrymple, author and co-founder of the festival, said.
The event this year will see over 250 authors, thinkers, politicians and popular culture icons, with a special focus on world literatures, and drive conversations around modern India in the context of its history and future.
International speakers like Pulitzer and Booker winning witers Alice Walker and Richard Flangan respectively, Rick Simonson, Margo Jefferson along with Indian authors Hira Ram Meena, Gulzar, CP Deval, will deliberate on a wide range of topics ranging from cinema to Caribbean poetry.
“The festival will see speakers ranging from ‘Lunch Box’ director Ritesh Batra to English director-novelist Bruce Robinson talking on cinema and screen writing.
“This time we have a battery of poets from different parts of the world, be it Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan. We have, for the first time, we have Caribbean writers who are taking the poetry world by storm,” Dalrymple said.
JLF will also see translations as one of the major areas of focus, and will represent over 30 languages from across the country.
“This year festival is more multi-vocal than it has ever been, we have about 30 languages represented here. In an increasingly parochial and polarised world, it is literature that helps us scale the walls and translation above all, is the tool that helps us access other cultures and knowledge systems,” Namita Gokhale, co-founder of the festival, said.
Other key themes will include the constitution, the Magna Carta, Sanskrit, auto-biographies, music, new emerging Indian writers with the discussion on movements from marginal communities to the center among other subjects.
The curtain raiser last evening which was themed, “Bhakti: Resilience, Resistance and Resonance’, was laced with musical performances accompanied by dramatic readings and translated renditions by writer and translator Arundhati Subramaniam, Kannada poet and playwright HS Shivaprakash and folk singer and storyteller Parvathy Baul.
According to Dalrymple, it is the festival’s “free for all” nature that is responsible for its ever-growing popularity among literature enthusiasts.
“Most of the other festivals charge you as high as 150 to 250 USD, but here everything is absolutely free. No single writer is paid to attend. And you have the pick of authors and award winners from across the globe flocking to this festival,” he said.
JLF will come to a close on January 23.
PTI