Big guns of literary world to descend on Jaipur lit fest

An unprecedented number of award winning authors are set to descend on Diggi Palace on Friday for the annual ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival.

Two Nobel laureates, Amartya Sen and Dr Harold Varmus, four listed writers from this year’s Man Booker Prize–Jhumpa Lahiri, Tash Aw, Jim Crace and Alison MacLeod–other Man Booker Prize listed authors Philip Hensher, A N Wilson and Justin Cartwright, will be present.

The Pulitzer Prize is well represented by Jonathan Franzen who was a finalist for The Corrections in 2002, Jhumpa Lahiri who won the Pulitzer for Interpreter of Maladies in 2000, as well as Mark Marzetti, a Pulitzer winning journalist who will discuss the work of the CIA.In addition to this, Franzen is also the recipient of the National Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the UK’s oldest literary prize.

The festival will welcome two winners of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Rana Dasgupta and Vikram Chandra, as well as Nayomi Munaweera, Tash Aw, Philip Hensher and Jhumpa Lahiri who have all been listed for the prize.Four winners of the Crossword Prize, William Dalrymple, Anand (C P Sachidanandan), Vikram Chandra and Jerry Pinto will join the event, along with four shortlisted writers. An incredible 12 winners of the Sahitya Akademi Prize will be present at the festival and will be reading from their work.