The Kerala Literature Festival, which is aspiring to be Kerala’s answer to the Jaipur international literature festival, will feature 500-odd authors from 15 countries as well as from across India.
Into its third edition, the KLF, to be held on the historic Kozhikode beach, will have around 200 sessions spread across a rainbow of human spheres.
The four-day festival, beginning February 8, will be opened by M.T. Vasudevan Nair. Poet K. Satchidanandan is the festival director.
The KLF will this time spotlight Irish literature. Ten renowned writers from Ireland, including Gabriel Rosenstock, Alan Titely and Amanda Bell, will make presentations on different genres of Irish literature. Five sessions would be on Irish literature. The Irish Ambassador to India will be a guest of honour at the opening ceremony.
General convener A.K. Abdul Hakeem told The Hindu that the festival organisers had decided to focus on the literature from a select country each year in order to add a distinct character to the KLF. Novelist Arundhati Roy will make her first appearance at a literature festival in her writing career at the KLF. Romila Thapar, world-famous Indian historian, will be among the speakers. The American linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky, 89, will be video-interviewed live at one of the sessions.
Shoba De, Rishi Kapoor, Prakash Raj, Rajdeep Sardesai, Kavitha Lankesh and Kanhaiya Kumar will be among the celebrities attending the festival. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s daughter Daman Singh and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s daughter Antara Dev Sen will speak at the sessions.
Ravi Deecee of DC Books, who is the chief facilitator of the festival, claims that the KLF has emerged as the second largest literature festival in India after the Jaipur International Literature Festival on which it was modelled. “Ïn fact, the KLF this time will have more authors and more sessions than the Jaipur festival which concluded recently,” he told The Hindu . Though the KLF was only three years old, it had already become a role model for other literature festivals in Kerala and outside. “Ït’s becoming viral,” he said.
The mass participation, the warm nature of the Kozhikode people and the lively ambience of the beach added to the success of the festival last year, he recalled.
Alongside the literature festival, there will be an ethnic food festival, a heritage tour and a film festival too. The KLF, presented by the DC Kizhakkemuri Foundation, is supported by Kerala Tourism and Incredible India.
