V.S. Naipaul, Eleanor Catton to attend Jaipur lit fest

Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, 2013 Man Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton, novelist Hanif Kureishi and current Man Booker Prize nominee Neel Mukherjee are some of the authors scheduled to attend the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival 2015 here early next year, a statement said Wednesday.

The eighth edition of the five-day festival will be held Jan 21-25 at the Diggi Palace here.

"The festival this year will have various themes running through various sessions and panel discussions. There will be a strong emphasis on poetry and the rich literature of the seven sister states of north-east India," the statement said.

"The festival has become one of the wonders of the thinking world... The 2015 edition will continue to nurture books, ideas, dialogue, and showcase the range and diversity of South Asian literature as well as the best in international writing," author Namita Gokhale, the festival co-director, said.

Also in attendance will be British journalist Christina Lamb, Urdu critic Rakshanda Jalil, poets Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Kedarnath Singh, German children's author Cornelia Funke and Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, among others.

British historian and writer William Dalrymple and Gokhale are the directors of the event that has previously hosted acclaimed writers like Orhan Pamuk, J.M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Vikram Seth, Pico Iyer and Mohammed Hanif.

"This may well be one of the strongest international lists we've ever fielded at Jaipur with several writers I've been chasing for almost a decade - Nicholson Baker, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Elizabeth Gilbert, Paul Theroux, Eleanor Catton, Kate Summerscale and Alberto Manguel - finally agreeing to come and star at Diggi," Dalrymple said.

He added that themes at the festival would include the meltdown in the Middle East and Afpak, spies, historical fiction, alternative sexualities, memoirs, cricket, politics, pirates and natural history.

The festival will also host the second edition of the Jaipur Bookmark - an initiative to develop and promote the Indian publication industry - at Narain Niwas on Jan 21-22.