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Time for Jaipur to eat, drink

and breath literature & art

The 13th edition of Jaipur Literature Festival offers its customary magical experience to all
art, culture and literature enthusiasts, writes chhavi bhatia

or five days towards the last frey, acclaimed author Elizabeth Gilbert,
week of January, Pink City and leading Indian film director Vishal
Jaipur eats, drinks and breathes Bhardwaj.
only literature as authors - The vast kaleidoscope has speakers
F popular and unknown, intelli- representing over 15 Indian languages
gentsia, thinkers, bibliophiles and curi- and 24 international languages as well
ous first timers make a beeline for Diggi as major awards such as the Nobel, the
Place. Bookmarked from January 23 to Man Booker, the Pulitzer, the Sahitya
January 27, the grand dame of global lit- Akademi, the Ramon Magsaysay Award,
erary festivals, the Jaipur Literature Fes- the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature,
tival, opens its 13th edition, providing its PEN Award for Poetry in Translation etc.
customary magical experience for all art, “This is our strongest Jaipur line up
culture and literature enthusiasts. ever. We have an especially triumphant
With more than 250 authors, think- line up in non-fiction with a world-beat-
ers, politicians, humanitarians, journal- ing roster of award-winning historians,
ists and popular culture icons picking biographers, memoirists and travel writ-
their brains on polity, geopolitics, climate ers including our biggest haul of Pullizer
changes, gender studies, and other burn- Prize winners ever with major interna-
ing topics, and not to forget books, the tional stars like Stephen Greenblatt, Dex-
JLF is rightly the ‘greatest literary show ter Filkins, Anand Gopal and Suketu Me-
on Earth’. hta,” says writer and festival co-director
The grand dame of literature festival William Dalrymple.
that has spawned many less lustrous “We also have an impressive line up of
cousins across the country, will feature Booker-winning novelists including
in its repertoire unique tales about food Howard Jacobson and John Lanchester,
and the memories food inspires, in its Leila Slimani from France and Elizabeth
2020 edition. Gilbert from the US. Above all, we’ll have
The five-day literary extravaganza is a special focus on climate change with
looked forward to for the exemplary line world-leading experts like David Wal- new book, the bestselling Winners Take
up of speakers that it brings on the plat- lace-Wells,” he adds. All: The Elite Charade of Changing the
form, and according to organisers, it is A major highlight of the five-day long World. Investigating the global elite’s
going to live up to the expectations it has event is Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee’s efforts to ‘change the world’- except us-
set over the years. session ‘Poor Economics: Fighting Global ing ways that threaten the social order
Hosting some of the world’s best lit- Poverty’, where he talks about his inno- and their position atop it, the author will
erary minds, experts from diverse fields vative field research-based approach to get into a conversation that offers trans-
such as literature, economy, environ- development economics. He explains the formative perspectives to complex soci-
ment, food and science take the stage need to understand and measure what etal problems.
for stimulating and thought-provoking happens in the real world to alleviate Memories of floods in Kerala, Mum-
conversations. This year’s stellar line- poverty, and the necessity of making the bai, Chennai, Srinagar, Patna over the
up includes eminent speakers such as poor and their decision-making central last few years when nature unleashed
2010 Man Booker Prize winner How- to the process. it fury, remain fresh, Experts have time
ard Jacobson, Pulitzer-winning authors Political philosopher and provoca- and again reiterated that these were not
Stephen Greenblatt and Dexter Filkins, teur Anand Giridharadas will take on isolated freak phenomena, but signal a
celebrated culinary expert Madhur Jaf- the privileged classes in his hard-hitting deeper ecological devastation.

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