Jaipur : Poet, novelist, literary critic and environmental activist Margret Atwood, Ruskin Bond, Steve McCurry, one of the world’s greatest living photographers, controversial Harvard historian Niall Ferguson and Britain’s national treasure, Stephen Fry, will participate in the Jaipur Literature Festival, described as the greatest literary show on earth.
The festival will be held from January 21 to 26, in which 165 world-class Indian and international authors are set to contribute to a spectacular line-up for its 2016 version.
French economist and a global voice on wealth and income inequality, Thomas Piketty, Bosnian American fiction writer Aleksandar Hemon, Israeli author and peace activist David Grossman and India’s most celebrated psychoanalyst and author, Sudhir Kakar, will take centre stage alongside some of India’s leading writers, including prominent Hindi poet and author Uday Prakash, Sahitya Akademi awardees in the world of Assamese literature Rita Chowdhury and Dhrubajyoti Bora, as well as prominent Gujarati poet and scholar Sitanshu Yashaschandra, among others.
The 2016 festival embraces and 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.
As ever, the festival celebrates the rich diversity of languages in South Asia. Leading Indian writers to be in attendance include Mridula Sinha, Alka Saraogi, Ashok Vajpeyi, Yatindra Mishra, Prabhat Ranjan, Harish Trivedi and Mridul Kirti in Hindi, Anita Agnihotri in Bengali, Vivek Shanbhag in Kannada, Ila Arab Mehta in Gujarati, Madhav Hada in Rajasthani, Makarand Sathe in Marathi, Sahil Maqbool in Kashmiri, and many others including the Santhali publisher Ruby Hembrom.
