Houston will host the Jaipur Literary Festival, which will feature eminent authors and critics like Mira Nair.
This year, the sixth Jaipur Literary Festival will be held in Houston and will feature a number of renowned authors, critics, and scholars, including the acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair. Houston will host the JLF festival, considered as one of the world’s top literary events, from September 15 to September 17.
In 2022, the festival successfully held the first hybrid edition of JLF Houston after two successful virtual editions in partnership with the Consulate General of India in Houston, the Asia Society Texas Centre, and Inprint. This was the festival’s third North American destination after New York and Colorado.
The festival will begin with a session titled “Ukraine: The Cost of War,” which will focus on the realities of conflict reporting and how the nature of war affects literature. The discussion will discuss the protracted and destructive Ukraine war.
Tetyana Dzyadevych, a scholar, commentator, and analyst of modern Ukrainian and Russian literature, will be on the panel along with Oksana Lutsyshyna, a Ukrainian author and poet who won the Lviv City of Literature UNESCO Prize, and Anjan Sundaram, a celebrated writer, journalist, and television host.
In a session exploring the human cost of “independence” in light of the intertwined cultural identities of Bengal and Bangladesh and the disastrous effects of the PLO, renowned author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and author Tayyba Maya Kanwal will be in conversation. “Independence” is a powerful narrative about the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent, decolonization, and sisterhood.
Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University and cosmologist Priyamvada Natarajan will discuss the “greatest hits” of cosmological discoveries made over the past 100 years.
Her book “Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas that Reveal the Cosmo” has received critical acclaim.
The festival will also include a session that explores the justifications for book bans throughout time and space, as well as the ways in which books continue to exist despite this erasure.
In another session, festival co-director and author Namita Gokhale will be in conversation with practicing attorney Parini Shroff, author of “The Bandit Queens,” and scholar Aruni Kashyap, author of “His Disease: Stories and The House with a Thousand Stories.”
Shroff and Kashyap will talk about polyphonic voices, the diversity of identity, and a sense of belonging in South Asian American writers’ stories and poems.
On September 12 and 13, the JLF held enlightening sessions in New York with luminaries including Congressman Shashi Tharoor, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Vijay Sheshadri, mathematician and novelist Manil Suri, and Sahitya Academy Award–winning poet and author Arundhati Subramaniam, among others.
