Mumbai, the commercial and cultural capital of the nation, will see a brand new literary festival on December 12, 2015. Titled Litventure, this is a day-long event that will be hosted by the Children’s Academy School in Malad East. The event is a brainchild of two groups – For Writers, By Authors, a Facebook community of authors; and Sip N Read, a startup that aims to bring together the main players in India’s literary world.
Litventure brings together several big names of Indian literature for its workshops and panel discussions. These names include Olivier Lafont, Ketan Bhagat, Debashish Irengbam, Utkarsh Patel, Kiran Manral, Shunali Khullar Shroff, Gopika Kapoor, Shilpa Gupta, Neil D’Silva, and several others. The authors will speak about their respective genres and about Indian reading and writing in general. Apart from this, authors from all over India will also be able to send books to the event, where they will be made available for purchase.
Special workshops are being planned for various demographics of audiences. The audience will be broken into various groups – students from various schools of Mumbai, parents/teachers, and aspiring authors and readers.
The attending students will have two separate events wherein they can expand their reading horizons. The first event will be an interactive session where students will be invited to share their thoughts and ideas about the books that they are reading. They are also encouraged to exchange the books as well.
The second session would be a workshop conducted by actor and author Olivier Lafont. Lafont is the author of Warrior and is well-known as the actor playing Kareena Kapoor’s boyfriend in the Bollywood movie, 3 Idiots.
For parents and teachers, we will have a panel hosted by Mumbai Mom, comprising of authors such as Shunali Khullar Shroff, Kiran Manral, Gopika Kapoor, and Ketan Bhagat. This one and half hour long event will talk about the role of books and reading in parenting. This segment of the programme will be organised by Mumbai Mom and will discuss about changing focus and relevance of parenting books in this age of information surplus.
There is also a book launch by Bloody Good Book, a publishing house that believes in crowd-curating. They are releasing Roomies/Foodies, a part cookbook and a part memoir, written by Meghana Chaudhary Joshi and Lakshmi Ashvin.
Aspiring authors will also have several workshops in which they will be able to learn the nitty-gritty’s of the publishing world from established bestselling authors and people from the publishing world. They will also be able to learn the ropes of different genres from various, well established authors.
A huge bonanza awaits the readers as well. There will be an arrangement to buy books from Indian authors at various discounted prices. A kiosk for selling eBooks from self-published authors is also being planned. The other features for readers will include a browsing and reading area and a multimedia room where promos of the featured books will be shown. After the main event, the attending authors will autograph books and pose for pictures with their fans.
Rohan Bhat, CEO of the Children’s Academy Group of Schools which is hosting Litventure, says, “We at Children’s Academy strongly believe that a strong interest in literature is very important for the holistic development of students. Unfortunately, we have noticed a downward trend in interest in reading, especially nowadays with the whole gamut of media available to our students. We hope giving our students this opportunity to converse with eminent authors of India and the opportunity to participate in the various programmes organized at Litventure will spark an interest in literature that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.”
Neil D’Silva, the founder of FWBA and one of the organizers of the event says, “Authors have very few options to connect with their readers, especially the self-published ones. The few options that are available are expensive and they do not have as much reach. FWBA is constantly planning such interactive ventures where authors can connect with their fans, and Litventure is the most positive step in this direction.”
NIE (Newspaper In Education), a venture of the Times Group, is the press partner for the event. Litventure is a free event. Our other partners are Pen Paper Coffee – an editing and proofreading service and Mumbai Mom. For more details and to register yourself, visit www.Litventure.in.
Tags: Litventure 2015
