Every year we try and raise the bar,” says Jaipur Literature Festival co-director and author William Dalrymple as the seventeenth edition of the extravaganza is poised to start from 1 February for five days.
The literary fest will see a range of linguistic diversity with sessions on 16 Indian and 8 international languages. The Indian languages include — Assamese, Awadhi, Banjara Language — Lamani (Lambada), Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Kurukh, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Tamil, Toda and Urdu.
For its 2024 edition, the festival will host about 550 speakers and artists across nationalities, as well as recipients of major awards such as the Booker, the International Booker, the Pulitzer, the Sahitya Akademi, Dada Saheb Phalke Award, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the JCB Prize for Literature and many more. It will feature a range of themes including fiction, non-fiction, literary criticism, history, politics, current affairs, economics, poetry, art, culture, architecture, translation, graphic novels, gender, science, medicine, food, biographies, memoir, mythology among others.
Author and festival co-director Namita Gokhale said at a preview hosted at the Leela Palace in Delhi recently: “In this, our seventeenth year, we remain committed to the rich diversity of our multilingual literary heritage. We have writers from over twenty-five nationalities. Sixteen Indian languages shall be represented, including those from the evocative oral traditions. We explore a universe of ideas and themes – mathematics to music, camels to cuisine, environment to economics, and fiction to faction.”
Dalrymple said they would present almost all the year’s most celebrated writers from around the world.
“We are thrilled tonight to introduce our extraordinary line-up in Delhi for the upcoming Jaipur Literature Festival 2024. The Festival consistently attracts a huge number of readers, writers & literature enthusiasts from Delhi, and our list of star writers consistently features the great figures from the Delhi literary community. We extend a warm invitation to all our friends from Delhi and across the globe to join us at Jaipur Literature Festival 2024, showcasing what is undeniably one of our most compelling line-up for Jaipur to date,” he said at the Delhi event.
Sanjoy K. Roy, Managing Director of Teamwork Arts, which produces the Jaipur Literature Festival, said their vision was one of “inclusivity, uniting the finest in literary excellence and fostering interdisciplinary conversations on a global scale”.