The much-awaited sixth annual DSC Jaipur Literature Festival, where literary talents from across the globe meet, has been scheduled from 24th to 28th January, 2013, at Diggi Palace in Jaipur. The five-day festival will encompass a wide range of activities including debates, discussions, readings, music, and workshops for the audiences.
The Jaipur Literature Festival is considered to be Asia’s leading literature event, celebrating national and international writers, and encompassing a range of activities including film, music and theatre. The festival has already hosted some of the best-known national and international writers including Orhan Pamuk,Alexander McCall Smith, Donna Tartt, Tina Brown, Shashi Tharoor, Mohammed Hanif, Paul Zacharia, among many others.
Like all its previous editions, this year’s Festival is open to all. A new venue, the Char Bagh, has been added to the existing venues at Diggi Palace to expand its capacity by another 5,000 people per hour. The DSC Jaipur Literature Festival continues to be the largest free literature festival and among the five largest such festivals in the world, with a unique visitor registration of 57,000, and a footfall of more than 122,000 in 2012.
Registrations for the Festival’s 2013 edition have begun for delegates, members of the media, and the general public. Details on registration and accreditation are available at the following link on the Festival’s website, jaipurliteraturefestival.org/registration/. While on-the-spot registration will be available at the venue, guests are encouraged to register online in advance to avoid long queues. Online booking closes on 21st January, 2013.
This year, too, the Festival will showcase the diversity of writing in Indian languages with over 16 languages represented, including Hindi, Urdu, Rajasthani, Tamil, Telugu, Bhojpuri, Maithili, Punjabi, Bangla, Malayalam, Gujarati, Sindhi, Kannada, and Kashmiri. A special emphasis will be on the transition of Maithili and Bhojpuri literature from the traditional to the contemporary.
The themes and session strands at the Festival will focus on a wide range of topics, some of which are: The Buddha in Literature, The Republic of Ideas (a Republic Day focus on ideas of India), Re-imagining the Kama Sutra, Hindi-English Bhai Bhai, Alternative Sexualities, Lok Geet Folk Geet, Bollywood ki Nayi Sanskriti, and Bibliodiversity Dialogues. The session, Remembering Sunil Da, will pay tribute to the late Sunil Gangopadhyay, who had once again accepted our invitation to attend the Festival in 2013 before his tragic demise. International sessions at the Festival will explore Russian literature, the Jewish novel, Shakespeare, Kipling, cricket writing, the New Africa, Iran, and writing on the contemporary art scene.
Some of the authors who have confirmed their presence at the Festival in 2013 are: Ambai, Benyamin, Bhalchandra Nemade, Diana Eck, Elizabeth Gilbert, Erica Jong, Frank Dikkoter, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gulzar, Hisham Matar, Homi Bhabha, Howard Jacobson, Javed Akhtar, Kancha Ilaiah, Kunwar Narain, Linda Grant, Madeline Miller, Michael Sandel, Michel Houellebecq, Nadeem Aslam, Neelesh Mishra, Orlando Figes, Pico Iyer, Reza Aslan, Simon Armitage, and Zoe Heller.
In 2012, the Festival hosted around 258 speakers, including 250 international and Indian authors, and over 100 performing artists from across the world.
