JLF to return to Houston with its sixth edition featuring celebrities like Mira Nair

Houston, Sep 14 (PTI) Hailed as one of the greatest literary shows globally, the Jaipur Literary Festival is returning to Houston featuring various celebrated writers, analysts and researchers, including award-winning filmmaker Mira Nair, between September 15 and 17.

The festival, after starting its footprints here in 2018 — its third destination in North America following New York and Colorado, successfully held in 2022 the first hybrid edition of JLF Houston, following two successful virtual editions in collaboration with the Consulate General of India in Houston, Asia Society Texas Centre, and Inprint.

Producer JLF Teamwork Arts is partnering the event in association with the Asia Society Texas Centre, Inprint, the University of Houston, Rothko Chapel and Eternal Gandhi Museum Houston.

The festival will open with a session on the long and devastating Ukraine war, titled Ukraine: The Cost of War’, focused on the realities of conflict reporting and how literature is impacted by the nature of war.

The panel will feature researcher, commentator, and analyst of contemporary Ukrainian and Russian culture and literature Tetyana Dzyadevych; Oksana Lutsyshyna, the Lviv City of Literature UNESCO Prize recipient and also a Ukrainian author and poet; as well as award-winning author, journalist and television presenter Anjan Sundaram.

At another session, film-maker Mira Nair, known for her films like Mississippi Masala, The Namesake, Monsoon Wedding, and Salaam Bombay, will talk about her cinematic language, the vocabulary of the moving image and her special affinity for literary adaptation.

In conversation with Sanjoy K. Roy, Managing Director of Teamwork Arts, she will discuss her work, world and motivation apart from her very successful musical adaptation of Monsoon Wedding which recently hit Broadway.

Celebrated author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, who recently published her novel “Independence” — a powerful narrative about the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent, decolonisation, and sisterhood — will be in conversation with author Tayyba Maya Kanwal, winner of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize, at a session examining the human cost of “independence” in the face of the interlinked cultural identities of Bengal and Bangladesh and the devastating consequences of the Partition.

Priyamvada Natarajan, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University, a cosmologist neck-deep in the mysteries of the universe, will talk about the greatest hits’ of cosmological discoveries over the past century.

She is the acclaimed author of “Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas that Reveal the Cosmo”.

The festival will also feature a session that examines the rationale of banning books across timescapes, social landscapes, and their survival despite this obliteration.

A panel comprising Oni K. Blair, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas; Tony Diaz, Cultural Accelerator, writer, activist, and the first Chicano to earn a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from the University of Houston; and Salil Tripathi, author and board member of PEN International, will be in conversation with Dorcas Hand, a Houston-based grassroots advocate working to reconstitute libraries in the Houston Houston Independent School District (ISD) schools.

At another session, Parini Shroff, practising attorney and author of “The Bandit Queens” and Aruni Kashyap, academic and author of “His Disease: Stories and The House with a Thousand Stories”, will be in conversation with Festival Co-Director and writer Namita Gokhale.

Shroff and Kashyap will discuss polyphonic voices, the plurality of identity, and a sense of belonging found in stories and poems by South Asian writers in the United States.

Prior to heading to Houston, JLF had enriching sessions in New York on September 12 and 13 which had luminaries like Madhur Jaffrey, cuisine and travel writer, Congress Leader, Member Parliament and acclaimed writer Shashi Tharoor, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Vijay Sheshadri, Mathematician and novelist Manil Suri, Sahitya Academy Award-winning poet and author Arundhati Subramaniam, celebrated writer Nandana Dev Sen, amongst others.

After the three-day JLF Houston, the next destination is the ninth edition of JLF Boulder Colorado from September 21 to September 23.