The Grand Tapestry of Ideas Unfurls: Jaipur Literature Festival Unveils Third List of Visionary Speakers
The annual and iconic Jaipur Literature Festival announced its third list of speakers for the much-awaited 17th edition, set to take place from February 1 – 5, 2024 at Hotel Clarks Amer, Jaipur. As the just-released list shows, the Festival will once again be a grand marathon of ideas between writers, thinkers, idealists, realists, visionaries, intellectuals, avant-garde practitioners and the iconoclasts, all of whom will engage in informed discussion, united by an abiding love for literature.
The third list of 25 speakers includes Amod K. Kanth, a prominent Indian social entrepreneur and activist with a parallel illustrious career as an IPS officer. His books include Khaki in Dust Storm: Police Diaries Volume-1’ and ‘Khaki on Broken Wings: Police Diaries Volume – 2; Arun Maira, former Member of India’s Planning Commission, Chairman of BCG India, Chairman of Save the Children India, and Chairman of Help Age International and author of the latest Shaping the Future: How to Be, Think, and Act in the New World; Badri Narayan, Sahitya Academy Award winning poet who’s poems have been translated into English, Bengali, Oriya, Malayalam, Urdu and many other Indian languages; Daisy Rockwell, artist and International Booker Prize winning translator, along with author Geetanjali Shree, for her translation of Shree’s Hindi novel, Tomb of Sand; Daniel Hahn, Booker International Prize shortlisted writer, editor, and translator, winner of the 2023 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature; Guillermo Rodríguez, author of When Mirrors Are Windows: A View of A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetics and co-editor of Journeys: A Poet’s Diary by A.K. Ramanujan and founding director of Casa de la India, a pioneering cultural centre in Spain; Gurucharan Das, former CEO of Procter & Gamble and author of his memoir Another Sort of Freedom; Ivy Ngeow, Malaysian-born, London-based author of The American Boyfriend, longlisted for the Avon x Mushens Entertainment Prize for Commercial Fiction Writers of Colour 2022.
The list continues with Kal Penn, actor, writer, former White House staff member and author of recently released memoir, ‘You Can’t Be Serious; Katherine Rundell, author of Super-Infinite, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize, and The Golden Mole and Other Vanishing Treasure; Koel Purie Rinchet, award-winning Indian actress, producer and writer of Clearly Invisible in Paris; Louise Kennedy, author of the Women’s Prize shortlisted novel, Trespasses, which also won the McKitterick Prize, the An Post Irish Novel of the Year Award and the British Book Awards Debut Novel of the Year; Manju Kapur, Commonwealth Prize winning author of the novel Custody which was made into one of Balaji’s longest running serials; Matthew Parker author of The Sugar Barons and Goldeneye: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica and his recent, One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink; Biographer, novelist, memoir writer and critic Miranda Seymour, author of the award-winning memoir In My Father’s House: Elegy for an Obsessive Love and recent biography I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys; Monica Ali, bestselling author of five books: Brick Lane (Shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize), Alentejo Blue, In the Kitchen, Untold Story and Love Marriage.
The Festival will also feature Naushad Forbes, Co-Chairman of Forbes Marshall, India’s leading Process and Energy Efficiency Company. His recent book is The Struggle and the Promise: Restoring India’s Potential; Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford University and author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World; The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World; and The Earth Transformed: an Untold History; Peter Moore, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Weather Experiment and Endeavour; Philip J. Stern, historian of the British Empire and the author of the award-winning book The Company-State and the latest Empire, Incorporated; Reshma Ruia, British Indian writer of the award-winning novel Still Lives; Richard Osman, author, producer and television presenter and bestselling writer of The Thursday Murder Club series; Sanjay Jha, Executive Director of Dale Carnegie and a former National Spokesperson for the Congress Party; Sudha Murty, Founder of Infosys Foundation, one of the first women engineers to start her career at TELCO (now Tata Motors), a prolific writer in English and Kannada; Yatindra Mishra, writer, columnist and cultural icon has worked extensively on the heritage of Indian music.
