By Suman Tarafdar

A little quibble to start with. As a regular at JLF, Jaipur Literature Festival of course, are you often left with regret at all the authors you did not get to hear, the sessions you missed because it clashed with another one, the writer you couldn’t get an autograph of, or meet, or even get a ‘selfie’ with? Yes, the unparalleled riches that JLF unloads over five days annually have spoilt us considerably.

If you are a ‘cup half full’ kind of person, accosting/smiling winningly at some globally acclaimed writers, hearing them live, getting your copy personally signed, you may just get a glow that often lasts till the next edition.

Or, if you are like me, you dwell on the misses. More than a decade and a half later, I am still chasing authors and often later bemoaning my lack of being able to be in two – or preferably four places – at once. For, the riches at JLF are vast and varied. This year’s edition has about 250 speakers yet again, ensuring that you will miss more than you meet. 

Who’s coming

Consider the stars – Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah; Booker Prize winners Bernardine Evaristo, Marlon James, Howard Jacobson and Shehan Karunatilaka; Baillie Gifford Prize winner Katherine Rundell; Ruth Ozeki, the winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction; Pulitzer Prize winners Siddhartha Mukherjee and Caroline Elkins; PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize awardee Rebecca Wragg Sykes; Wolfson History Prize-winning author Ruth Harris; winner of both Brage and Riverton Prizes Kjell Ola Dahl… Of course, International Booker Prize winners Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell can expect to be mobbed. Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar recipient Tanuj Solanki will also be there.  

Then, there are names that even if unfamiliar at present, you would be well-advised to look up -- Christopher Kloeble, David Olusoga, Aanchal Malhotra, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Chigozie Obioma and Jamil Jan Kochai, among others.  

Of course, JLF expanded the narrow ‘definition’ of literature long ago. So, there’s ceramicist Edmund de Waal, archaeologists Warwick Ball and Richard Blurton, a host of museologists, flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia, environmentalist Vandana Shiva, photographer Dayanita Singh, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and mathematician-novelist (!) Manil Suri.

Go figure. Of course, expect to encounter Javed Akhtar, Nasreen Munni Kabir, Carol Black, P. Sainath, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Shashi Tharoor, Amit Chaudhuri, Anthony Sattin, Deepti Naval, John Keay, Alexandra Pringle, Gulzar, Onir and many other regulars.

You get an idea of how much you might miss! Sanjoy Roy, festival producer & MD Teamwork Arts, ascribes the number of unusually high-profile authors to the opening up after two years of hesitancy about travel. “We have had way more acceptance from some of the leading names than we would perhaps get in a typical year.”

“Every year, we try and raise the bar at the annual Jaipur Literature Festival, but 2023 will undoubtedly be our finest festival yet,” affirmed William Dalrymple, co-director of JLF, at the curtain raiser in Delhi. “We are proud to present almost all the year’s most decorated writers.” For Namita Gokhale, writer, publisher and co-director, JLF, “2022 has been an important landmark in the world recognition of Indian and South Asian literature.”