All set for Jaipur Lit Fest 2013

 The much-awaited sixth edition of the annual DSC Jaipur Literature Festival has been scheduled from January 24 to 28, at Diggi Palace in Jaipur.

The five-day festival will encompass a wide range of activities including debates, discussions, readings, music, and workshops.

Like all its previous editions, 2013 Festival is open to all. A new venue, the Char Bagh, has been added to the existing venues at Diggi Palace to expand its capacity by another 5,000 people per hour.

The DSC Jaipur Literature Festival continues to be the largest free literature festival and among the five largest such festivals in the world, with a unique visitor registration of 57,000 and a footfall of more than 1,22,000 in 2012.

Over 16 languages will be represented, including Hindi, Urdu, Rajasthani, Tamil, Telugu, Bhojpuri, Maithili, Punjabi, Bangla, Malayalam, Gujarati, Sindhi, Kannada, and Kashmiri. A special emphasis will be on the transition of Maithili and Bhojpuri literature from the traditional to the contemporary.

The themes and session strands at the Festival will focus on a wide range of topics; some of which are, The Buddha in literature, Republic of Ideas (a Republic Day focus on ideas of India), Re-imagining the Kama Sutra, Hindi-English Bhai Bhai, Alternative Sexualities, Lok Geet Folk Geet, Bollywood ki Nayi Sanskriti, and Bibliodiversity Dialogues.

The session remembering Sunil Da, will pay tribute to the late Sunil Gangopadhyay, who had accepted the invitation to attend the festival before his death.

International sessions at the festival will explore Russian literature, the Jewish novel, Shakespeare, Kipling, cricket writing, the New Africa, Iran, and writing on the contemporary art scene.

Some of the authors who have confirmed their presence at the Festival in 2013 are Diana Eck, Elizabeth Gilbert, Erica Jong, Frank Dikkoter, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Howard Jacobson, Kancha Ilaiah, Linda Grant, Madeline Miller, Michael Sandel, Orlando Figes, Pico Iyer, Reza Aslan, Simon Armitage, and Zoe Heller.