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 fifth set of 10 speakers appearing at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2017 were announced as:
1.ArshiaSattar’s translation of the Valmiki Ramayana has been published as a Penguin Classic. Her other works on the epic include Lost Loves: Exploring Rama's AnguishandUttara: The Book Answers. She has written four books for children, which include Kisshkindha Tails, Pampa Sutra, Adventures with Hanuman and most recently, the Ramayana for Children. She has also translated from Sanskrit, Tales from the Kathasaritsagaraand a collection of stories about money titled, The Mouse Merchant. She co-founded and runs the Sangam House international writers' residency programme outside Bangalore.
2. Sanjeev Sanyalis an internationally acclaimed economist, bestselling author and an urban theorist. He was the Global Strategist and Managing Director of one of the world's largest banks and was named Young Global Leader 2010 by the World Economic Forum. In 2007, he was awarded the Eisenhower Fellowship for his work on urban dynamics. He currently serves as a member of the Future City Committee of the Singapore government that is creating the roadmap for the city-state for the next 15 years. Sanyal’s books include Land of the Seven Rivers, The Indian Renaissance, The Incredible History of India's Geography and The Ocean of Churn. He was given the inaugural International Indian Achievers Award for contributions to literature in 2014.
3. Philip A. Lutgendorfis Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. He has a strong interest in Hindi poetry, including the work and life of Tulsidas and the epic poem Ramcharitmanas, which he is currently translating into English. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002-03 for his research on the popular ‘monkey-god’ Hanuman, which has been published as Hanuman's Tale- The Messages of a Divine Monkey. His other works include The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidasand The Indo-Aryan language. He returns to Jaipur Literature Festival in 2017.
4.Rick Simonson is legendary in his role as the chief bookseller at the Elliott Bay Book Company. Since 1976, Simonson has grown and cultivated this iconic Seattle institution, which offers the best selection of new and bargain books with over 150,000 titles at its home on Capitol Hill. He is on governing and advisory boards with Copper Canyon Press, the University of Washington Press and Seagull Books. He has been a jury member for the DSC South Asian Literature Prize and the US’s National Book Award. He has also spoken on bookselling and publishing at festivals and conferences in the United States, China, the UAE as well as the Jaipur Literature Festival, which he has been attending since 2010.
5. Guillermo Rodríguez, an active promoter of Indo-Spanish cultural relations, is the founding director of Casa de la India, a pioneering cultural centre in Spain that has become a model for India’s cultural diplomacy abroad. A passionate traveller, he lived in India in the 1990s and specialised in Indian literary criticism and modern Indian poetry in English, obtaining a PhD in English from the University of Kerala and the University of Valladolid. He has published critical works on Indian literature and culture in India, Spain, France, Germany and Poland, and is the author of When Mirrors Are Windows: A View of AK Ramanujan’s Poetics. In 2012, he was awarded the Friendship Award by the Government of India for his contribution to Indo-Spanish cultural relations. Having recently spoken at JLF at Boulder, he will be attending the Jaipur Literature Festival for the first time.
6. Ishion Hutchinson is the author of the poetry collectionsFar District: Poems and House of Lords and Commons. Hutchinson is the recipient of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for poetry, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner Journal and the Academy of American Poets’ Larry Levis Prize. He is the Meringoff Sesquicentennial Fellow and Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University and a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.
7. Returning to the Jaipur Literature Festival is John Keay, whohas written numerous books on South Asia; mostly histories. His latest work, The Tartan Turban, isalong awaited inquest into the adventures of Alexander Gardner, colonel of artillery in the army of the Sikh Khalsa and unquestionably ‘travel’s greatest enigma’. His writing is known for its combination of meticulous research with wit, narrative and lively prose.
8. Barry Cunliffe is Emeritus Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford. He has excavated widely in Britain and Western Europe and is the author of a number of books. His most recent, By Steppe, Desert and Ocean, looks at human connections across Eurasia from 10,000 BC to the Mongol invasions. He was knighted in 2006.
9. Adam Thirlwellis the award-winning author of three novels, Politics, The Escape and Lurid & Cute; a novella, Kapow!; and Multiples, a project with international novels. His work has been translated into 30 languages. He is the winner of the EM Forster Award and a Somerset Maugham Award and has twice been chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.
10. Emma Sky, OBE, is a British expert on the Middle East who served in Iraq between 2003 and 2010. Sheis the author of The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq. She teaches Middle East politics at Yale University’s Jackson Institute. She is an Officer of the British Empire. This will be her first appearance at Jaipur Literature Festival.
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