The list of 10 Speakers at ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival 2017 10@10

The Jaipur Literature Festival 2017 10@10

2017 marks ten years of the ‘greatest literary show on Earth’ 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.

The ZEE 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.

Some Announcements of Speakers appearing at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2017 :

Anne Waldman

After appearing at JLF@Boulder, internationally acclaimed poet Anne Waldman makes her first visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival. She is an active member of the ‘Outrider’ experimental poetry community and her poetry sits alongside the likes of Allan Ginsberg with whom she set up the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She is the author of over 40 books of poetry, including the book-length hybrid narrative eco-poem Manatee/Humanity and the feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, which won the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. Other recent books include Gossamurmur. Jaguar Harmonics and Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics, co-edited with Laura Wright, and her latest, Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born.

Narendra Kohli is a Hindi-language author who has been credited with reinventing the ancient form of epic writing in modern prose. He returns to theJaipur Literature Festival after appearing in 2013 in a session with the prison reforms activist and journalist Vartika Nanda. His most famous work is Abhyudaya, written in four parts, which was the first novel in any language to deal with the entire Ramayana.

Narendra Kohli

Swanand Kirkire has a career that spans many of the creative arts, though he may most famously be known as a lyricist, having won the National Film Award for Best Lyrics twice, with his most famous song “Bawra mann dekhne chala ek sapna”. His career started in the theatre, directing before moving into writing for television and eventually acting in films including Crazy Cukkad Family, and theatre.

Ruth Padelis an award-winning poet, novelist, critic and author. She has been publishing poetry collections since 1990, starting with Summer Snow on history, The Mara Crossing on migration, Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth on the Middle East and Darwin: A Life in Poems on her great-great grandfather Charles Darwin. Her first novel, Where the Serpent Lives, was published in 2010 and is framed by wildlife, which remains a key theme to her work.

A returning speaker at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Vikram Chandra’s critically acclaimed novel Sacred Games won the Vodafone Crossword Award for English Fiction and a Salon Book Award. Over the summer, Netflix announced an adaptation of the book to be their first original series from India. Chandra’s first novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain also received outstanding critical acclaim, winning the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for First Book and the David Higham Prize for Fiction.

Simon Winchester

Simon Winchester, OBE is a British writer, journalist and broadcaster although he began his career in geology, working in many different countries. As a journalist he was again posted around the world and he published his first non-fiction book The Professor and the Madman in 1998, his most recent, Pacific, is a biography of the Pacific Ocean.

Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso, who was once called ‘a literary institution of one’ by Lila Azam Zanganeh in The Paris Review. He became Chairman of publishing house Adelphi Edizioni in 1999 and has produced several works examining the culture of modernity. His work includes a focus on ancient Indian mythology as seen through Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India and his latest offering, Ardor. He will return to the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2017.

Neil MacGregor is a Scottish art historian who has worked as the director of the National Gallery, London and the British Museum. His non-fiction historical books, including A History of the World in 100 Objects – based on a BBC Radio 4 and World Service programme – and German: Memories of a Nation, are highly popular texts. This will be his first appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival.

American Journalist Dexter Filkins was part of the winning team for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for their dispatches from Pakistan and Afghanistan, an award he was previously nominated for in 2002. Now writing for The New Yorker he was once called ‘the premier combat journalist of his generation’ in the Washington Post. His book, The Forever War, was a New York Times bestseller.

Tahmima Anam is a British-Bangladeshi writer, novelist and columnist who won the Best First Book Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for A Golden Age in 2008, set amidst the backdrop of the 1971 war of independence for Bangladesh. Her latest novel The Bones of Grace concludes this trilogy and is a story of migration and belonging. Anam returns to the Jaipur Literature Festival for the third time, also having recently spoken at the London edition of the Festival in 2016

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