In 2017, Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) will be presenting its tenth edition and to celebrate a decade of its existence, the organisers have decided to reveal the line-up of speakers over the coming ten weeks.
The ten names disclosed in the first update yesterday attest to JLF's reputation for bringing together the best writers from across the world as well as from within India. These include:
Alice Walker: Best known for The Color Purple, a scathing novel about race relation in the US, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the National Book Award in 1983. She is the first African-American writer to enjoy the distinction of winning two of the most prestigious literary awards in the US.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: The well-loved author of The Palace of Illusions (2008), a retelling of the Mahabharata from Druapadi's point of view, is also a poet, activist and teacher based in the US. Many of her works have been made into films and plays and translated into 29 languages.
Eka Kurniawan: The first Indonesian to be nominated for a Man Booker International Prize, he is known for his debut novel, Beauty is a Wound (first published in Indonesia in 2002), which has been translated into more than 24 languages. It was included in a list of 100 notable books by The New York Times.
SL Bhyrappa: One of modern India's most important novelists, the Kannada writer was awarded the Padma Shri in 2016.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Lebanese-American writer, who came into prominence in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, is best known his books on probability, uncertainty and randomness. The Black Swan is one of his most popular works.
Mark Haddon: The British novelist, who writes for both children and adults, is the author The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which won the Whitbread Award, the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and a Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
Sir David Hare: The British playwright and screenwriter, winner of two Laurence Olivier Awards and two-time Academy Award nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Hours and The Reader, is going to be back to the Jaipur next year.
Alan Hollinghurst: The author of novels such as The Line of Beauty, The Swimming Pool Library and The Stranger's Child, he is the winner of several literary awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award, James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Man Booker Prize (2014).
Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. This would be his second visit to JLF.
NoViolet Bulawayo shook the literary scene in 2013 with her debut novel, We Need New Names, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, making her the first black African woman, and the first Zimbabwean, to feature on it.
The names of the other speakers will be revealed in the coming ten weeks, every Tuesday at 6 pm, till 20 December 2016.
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