Jaipur BookMark

The Book in All its Dimensions

18 – 23 January, ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival, Diggi Palace Hotel

The fourth edition of Jaipur BookMark (JBM) opens the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival’s proceedings with a full day of industry focused business to business programming on 18th January at Diggi Palace followed by special sessions at a dedicated venue within the Festival Hub from the 19th – 23rd January. JBM continues to provide a platform for publishers, literary agents, translation agencies and writers to meet, talk business deals and listen to major industry players from across the world.

On Wednesday 18 January Jaipur BookMark will open with a keynote session by celebrated publisher, writer and linguist Roberto Calasso talking about the Art of Publishing and the launch of this year’s JBM Global Translation Rights Catalogue.

Every year the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival makes a concerted effort to ensure that the multitude of Indian languages is showcased while its industry arm, Jaipur BookMark, focuses on the art and business of translation. This is set to continue in 2017 with over 25 languages represented in works spanning the country’s literary landscape as well as international translations in a bid to preserve and promote the diverse range of life, culture and stories from India and across the world.

Translation

In a series of sessions—Twice Told Tales authors and translators come together for intimate readings of their new works including Roberto Calasso’s Ardor, his latest meditation on ancient Indian philosophy in Italian, English and Hindi; Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar a revealing glimpse into middle-class urban India; and U.R. Anantamurthy’s seminal Bara depicting the devious realities of Indian democracy.

Are Mahasweta Devi and Rabindranath Tagore responsible for seeding the translation process between India’s diverse regional languages? In Translation: A Case Study in Literary Exchange, a panel including

Radha Chakravarty, Naveen Kishore, Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee, Guillermo Rodríguez and Reba Som gather to discuss this idea.

Ten writers, translators, academics and readers including Sujata Sen, Dhrubajyoti Bora and Christoph Senft and several international speakers present the ten best translated works from South Asian languages that they have read in the last decade in 10/10 Reading South Asia in Translation.

Even as major book awards open up to literary translations, the dynamics of cultural politics continue to influence perceptions. Why do authors still dream of being translated into English and how is English the universal currency for literary exchange? These are all hot topics explored in Politics of Literary Translation with speakers including Francesca Orsini, Naveen Kishore, Rumena Buzarovska, Arshia Sattar, Naveen Kishore, Mrinal Pande and Deborah Smith. This discussion is followed by the Vani Foundation Translation Award announcement, in association with Teamwork Arts.

A cross-section of publishing houses from the India, South Asia and Asia Pacific regions will pitch their forthcoming translation  lists to other publishers, media representatives, book reviewers and books page editors including Urvashi Butalia, Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee, Ravi Deecee and Ambar C. Chatterjee in a session called At Home in the World: Media interaction.

The importance of providing children with first language learnings in their local mother tongues is discussed in Reading in the Mother Tongue: Talking Children’s Literature. Leading publishers and experts talk about nurturing and encouraging young minds to read in their mother tongues where cultural contexts and frames of references are familiar as opposed to alien to them.

Publishing Industry

A session on brick-and-mortar bookstores in the age of e-books, Celebrating Booksellers: Curating Reading Lists, sees representatives from iconic bookstores across India and the world highlight the role of engaged booksellers in stimulating reading choices and curating book lists for online and offline audiences.

The art of promoting books in today’s complex social media-driven world is discussed in Algorithms of the Indian Market. Bestselling authors, business development experts and marketing strategists from the Indian book trade share their success formulae in this session on understanding the algorithms that unscramble the dynamic Indian market.

Charlie Redmayne, CEO Harper Collins, Ananth Padmanabhan and Cate Blake, Urvashi Butalia, Naveen Kishore take part in a conversation about the recent and radical transformations of the role of publishing and curating content a technology-driven society in Publishing Perspectives: Goals and Signposts.

Spotlight: Trends in Media and Publishing brings Sahapedia, an open online resource on the arts, cultures and heritage of India. “Saha”, Sanskrit for “together with”, is an invitation to explore the richness of India’s cultural landscapes together.

The Digital Empowerment Foundation’s aim is to end economic poverty and social backwardness through the simple expedient of ending information poverty by empowering marginalised and information-dark communities with digital literacy, access to digital tools, and to usher in information-rich knowledge societies through the Internet and the digital revolution. A series of presentations launch The Asymptote Journal Launch & discussion Granthika.com presentation on reinventing writing and reading for the digital age by Vikram Chandra. The Bombay review: Kartikeya Bajpayee Samudra Basu presentation on archiving author resources an open online resource on the arts, cultures and heritage of India.

Design and Digital

The rise of digital is once again addressed in a variety of sessions including Digital Content: Binaries of Empowerment which explores the vast digital knowledge resource that online platforms provide a new generation, as well as the crucial role of translation in making this accessible across the world.

With the emergent language of digital imagery, through the interventions of technology and popular taste, graphic and visual elements have been returned to story-telling. Katha to Comics: The Evolution of Visual Storytelling in India explores the ancient oral and pictorial narrative legacy of India which has found new resonance in a variety of innovative formats.

Publishers and graphic designers from across the world discuss the importance of covers, images, text and typefaces in bringing narratives to life in print and electronic media in Design and Graphic Identity: The Print and Digital Imagination. This will be followed by Oxford Bookstore Book Cover Prize Announcement with Priti Paul, Dayanita Singh, Aman Nath, Alka Pande and Namita Gokhale.

International

A high powered EU delegation including Roman Simic, Rumena Buzarovska, Eluned Gramich, Inga Zolude, Zanete Vevere-Pasqualini, Alexandra Buchler and Claire Azzopardiexamines publishing opportunities and collaborations in Literary Europe Live in India 2017.

A focus on international practice will be shared through the participation of a high level Australian delegation at Jaipur BookMark, as well as a session on the global issues around copyright and intellectual property rights with experts from Switzerland, Germany, France, Australia and India.

Sanjoy K. Roy, Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple from the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival will be hosting a Round Table of Festival Directors and Lit Prize Directors from across the world at Jaipur BookMark to discuss their vision and agenda.\

JBM@JLF

Running alongside the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival at Diggi Palace, are three JBM@JLF sessions, with themes of translation and cultural exchange.as part of the JLF programme..

“I Resemble Everyone but Myself”: Understanding A.K. Ramanujan brings together Guillermo Rodríguez with Philip A. Lutgendorf and Arshia Sattar to discuss the influence of the late A.K. Ramanujan’s profound and prolific output. Guillermo Rodríguez’s When Mirrors Are Windows: A View of A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetics examines the poet, scholar, philologist, folklorist and translator who transformed the Indian way of seeing.

Chandrahas Chaudhury in conversation with Jatindra K.Naik explores the late Gopinath Mohanty’s novels about tribal life in Odisha. One of India’s most iconic novelists, this session celebrates his work and vision, with particular focus on the recent translation of Amrutara Santana- The Dynasty of the Immortals.

The crucial task of the translator in bringing a book alive in another language and adding to the corpus of world literature is only recently being recognised and celebrated. In a session with stellar translators such as Deborah Smith, who has rendered the Man Booker International Prize Winning Korean writer Han Kang into English and Arunava Sinha the major force behind the translation of classic and contemporary Bangla literature, JBM’s director Neeta Gupta puts the skill in the spotlight at the Translator’s Centre Stage

Also chiming with ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival’s focus on film, Books to Film explores the interface between literature and cinema and the cross-sharing of hybrid content across platforms sees a star cast of speakers including Saugata (Star TV), Vikram Chandra, Anupama Chopra and Arindam Sil (Look East Focus) share their experiences and expectations of the new media opportunities.

Finally, in a new initiative by Jaipur BookMark, The First-Book Club, brings aspiring authors shortlisted for the New Writers’ Mentorship Programme and the Bloggers Competition the fantastic opportunity of a special one-on-one session where they are assessed by industry experts who also bring their skills and experience to guide their talents. Mentors on this session include Ravinder Singh, Namita Gokhale, Anuj Bahri, MitaKapur, Urvashi Butalia Mili and Aishwarya

Writer and Festival Director Namita Gokhale says“The Jaipur Bookmark, in its fourth year now, has created a crucial space for publishers, writers and the book trade to creatively connect and share ideas and strategies, within India and internationally. Our special focus on translations in the 2017 edition helps South Asian literatures resonate with each other and the world. Jaipur Bookmark will catalyse new opportunities and understanding for publishing in the region.”

Director of Jaipur BookMark, Neeta Gupta says, “India offers a rich landscape of writing and Jaipur BookMark is well placed to showcase the best of such writing and to help facilitate the sale and exchange of rights both between Indian languages and internationally.”

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

Nitisha.Prabhakar@edelman.com / Amrita.Sarna@edelman.com

For Jaipur media coordination on the Jaipur Literature Festival, please contact Spark PR:

Jagdeep Singh (M: 09829065787) (Email id: info@sparkpr.in)

Kamal Kant (M: 09571836810) (Email id: info@sparkpr.in)

ABOUT JAIPUR BOOKMARK

Jaipur BookMark: The Book in all its Dimensions

In 2014, the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival began an important new initiative: Jaipur BookMark. Conceptualised as a B2B segment, JBM is held parallel to the main Festival and provides a platform for publishers, literary agents, translation agencies and writers to meet, talk business deals, listen to speakers from across the world and perhaps even sign the occasional contract.

 

The fourth edition of Jaipur BookMark moves to the Festival Hub of Diggi Palace and will continue to serve the publishing industry. Kicking off on 18 January, JBM 2017 opens with a full day of programming followed by sessions, presentations, master classes and award announcements during the main ZEE ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival between 19-23 January.

 

Translation will remain our prime focus at JBM 2017 and we are very excited about introducing the literature of India’s eastern states of West Bengal, Assam, Manipur and Orissa to a wider audience. The Jaipur BookMark Global Translation Rights Catalogue 2017 will also feature writing from this region.

 

For more information, please write to us at: jaipurbookmark@teamworkarts.com

 

About the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival 2017

The past decade has seen the ZEE 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 ZEE 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 ZEE 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, ZEE JLF spread its wings beyond the borders of India with an annual event in May at London’s Southbank Centre. In 2015, ZEE 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 ZEE 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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