Jaipur Literature Festival 10@10

#10 Speakers10Weeks 

Tuesday 18 October – The First Jaipur Literature Festival 2017 10@10

2017 marks ten years of the Jaipur Literature Festival and its meteoric rise from a small gem of an idea to the world’s largest free literary festival, having hosted more than 1300 speakers over the past decade.

Frequently described as “the greatest literary show on Earth”, the Jaipur Literature Festival 2017 will take place between 19 and 23 January 2017 in its beautiful home at the historic Diggi Palace Hotel in Jaipur.

The Festival expects to welcome over 250 authors, thinkers, politicians, journalists, and popular culture icons to Jaipur this coming January. Equity and democracy run through the Festival’s veins, placing some of the world’s greatest wordsmiths and intellects from all walks of life together on stage.

Today, the first 10 speakers appearing at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2017 were announced as:

  1. Alice Walker makes her first visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2017. A critically acclaimed American novelist, short story writer, poet and activist, she made history as the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the National Book Award in 1983 for her novel The Color Purple. Other well-known works include Meridian and The Third Life of Grange Copeland.
  1. Fresh off her recent appearance at JLF@Boulder earlier in September, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni returns to the Jaipur Literature Festival after a gap of six years. A bestselling author, poet, activist and teacher based in the United States of America, several of her works have been made into films and plays, and translated into 29 languages. Among her best-known works, which are usually situated in India or America, are Arranged Marriage, which won an American Book Award, while Mistress of Spices was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.
  1. A TV scriptwriter by trade, Eka Kurniawan, became the first Indonesian to be nominated for a Man Booker International Prize and won the 2016 Emerging Voices Award. Kurniawan’s debut novel Beauty is a Wound (first published in Indonesia in 2002) has been translated into more than 24 languages and was included in a list of 100 notable books byThe New York Times. His second book is titled Man Tiger while his third novel, Love and Vengeance, is due to be released next year.
  1. SL Bhyrappa is widely regarded as one of modern India’s foremost novelists. A Kannada writer, his works are popular within his home state ofKarnataka as well as across India and in the United States. In 2016, he was awarded the Padma Shri, India’s fourth highest civilian honour.
  1. Nassim Nicholas Taleb came to wide public attention when he predicted the 2008 global financial crisis. The Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, former trader and risk analyst focuses his research and writing on probability, uncertainty and randomness. His book The Black Swan was described in a review by The Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II. Taleb refuses all honours and anything that “turns knowledge into a spectator sport”. 2017 marks his second visit to Jaipur Literature Festival.
  1. Mark Haddon, the British novelist who writes for both children and adults, makes his first visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is best-known forThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which won the Whitbread Award, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His latest work, The Pier Falls: And Other Stories, is his first collection of short stories and has been widely praised.
  1. Sir David Hare, the well-known English playwright and screenwriter, winner of two Laurence Olivier Awards and two-time Academy Award nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Hours and The Reader returns to the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2017.
  2. Alan Hollinghurst, author of The Line of Beauty, The Swimming Pool Library and his most recent novel, The Stranger’s Child, has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award, James Tait Black Memorial Prize and in 2004, the Man Booker Prize. This will be his first visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival.
  1. Richard Flanagan has a host of acclaimed novels to his name, including Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould’s Book of Fish and The Unknown Terrorist. Hailed as one of Australia’s finest writers, his most recent novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, won the 2014 Man Booker Prize. JLF 2017 marks his second visit to the Festival.
  1. No Violet Bulawayo blasted onto the literary scene in 2013 with her debut novel We Need New Names, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, making her the first black African woman and the first Zimbabwean to do so. This will be her first visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Further information on sessions and more speakers appearing at the 10th Jaipur Literature Festival will follow over the coming weeks.

~~ ENDS ~~

NOTES TO MEDIA PERSONS

Information on Registration for the Jaipur Literature Festival can be found here: https://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/registration-2017/

For media enquiries on the Jaipur Literature Festival, please contact Edelman India:

Priya Dhawan – +91 9811319602 | Priya.Dhawan@edelman.com

Nitisha Prabhakar – +91 959111723 | Nitisha.Prabhakar@edelman.com

Amrita Sarna – +91 9999214613 | Amrita.Sarna@edelman.com

About the Jaipur Literature Festival 2017

The past decade has seen the Jaipur Literature Festival grow into the world’s largest free event of its kind. Having hosted 1300 speakers and welcoming nearly 1.2 million book lovers, the success of JLF has been astonishing and heartwarming.

Celebrating writers from across the globe, the Festival has hosted some of the best regarded and loved names, ranging from Nobel Laureates and Man Booker Prize winners to debut writers such as Amish Tripathi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Eleanor Catton, Hanif Kureishi, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Ian McEwan, JM Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Mohammed Hanif, Oprah Winfrey, Orhan Pamuk, Pico Iyer, Salman Rushdie, Stephen Fry, Thomas Piketty, Vikram Seth and Wole Soyinka, as well as renowned Indian language writers such as Girish Karnad, Gulzar, Javed Akhtar, MT Vasudevan Nair, Uday Prakash as well as the late Mahasweta Devi and UR Ananthamurthy.

Writers and Festival Directors Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple invite authors from across the globe to take part in the five-day programme set against the backdrop of Rajasthan’s stunning cultural heritage and the Diggi Palace in the state capital Jaipur.

Equity and democracy run through the Festival’s veins, placing some of the world’s greatest writers and thinkers from all walks of life together on stage. All events are completely free and there are no reserved spaces; this egalitarian access is a powerful statement in a country where access to such individuals remains the privilege of a few. On top of all this, people are guaranteed to have fun!

As Time Out said: “It’s settled. The Jaipur Literature Festival is officially the Woodstock, Live 8 and Ibiza of world literature, with an ambience that can best be described as James Joyce meets Monsoon Wedding.”

The Festival is a flagship event of Teamwork Arts, which produces over 25 highly acclaimed performing arts, visual arts and literary festivals across more than 40 cities globally, and is produced by Sanjoy K. Roy.

In 2014, JLF spread its wings beyond the borders of India with an annual event in May at London’s Southbank Centre. In 2015, JLF headed across the pond to Boulder, Colorado where it hosts a similar event every September.
Website: www.jaipurliteraturefestival.org

About Teamwork Arts

For over 25 years, Teamwork Arts has taken India to the world and brought the world to India.

In countries such as Australia, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Israel, Korea, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, UK and USA, Teamwork produces over 25 highly acclaimed performing arts, visual arts and literary festivals across more than 40 cities.

Teamwork Arts produces one of the world’s largest free literary gatherings, the annual Jaipur Literature Festival, the Ishara International Puppet Festival in New Delhi, the annual Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META) and Festival, international festivals Shared History in South Africa, Eye on India in the United States of America, India by the Bay in Hong Kong, Confluence- Festival of India in Australia, and many more.

Website: www.teamworkarts.com

 

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