The eight edition of the ZEE Literature Festival, ended on a high, as the festival received a record footfall of 2,45,000 in a period of five days. It is an unusually large number for the festival. The number of international visitors from the past years had doubled. People from more than 50 countries had visited the festival. Another encouraging statistic was that there was a 40% jump in the students attending the festival. This year around 300 authors and 140 musicians had participated in the festival. There were two new venues this year, The Amber Fort and Hawa Mahal. The sessions with Nobel Laureate Sir VS Naipaul and former president of India, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam were the most popular sections and each session was jam packed with audience, with around 5,000 audience present at each session.
Other highlights of the festival included Man-Booker Prize winner, Eleanor Catton, renowned travel writer Paul Theorux. Other eminent personalities included from the cinema industry, such as Waheeda Rehman, Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi. Some leading novelists were also present at the event such as Sarah Waters, Kamila Shamsie, Amit Chaudhri and Eimear McBride.
There were three prizes which were distributed at the fest this year, which included the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, which was won by Jhumpa Lahiri. The Ojas art award was presented to Bhajju Shyam and Venkat Raman Singh. The Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for poetry was awarded to the poet Arundhati Subramaniam for her work, ‘When God is a traveller’. Once again the festival brought together speakers from across various fields such as political, social, religious and artistic. This was done in order to form a cultural forum for discussion.
The theme of the festival was freedom of creative expression. DNA newspaper’s Chief Cartoonist, Manjul showcased drawings from the paper. This prompted a debate and discussion over the rights and responsibility of writers and artists in the current climate.
The closing of the festival was marked by a rousing debate; the topic being Culture is the New Politics, The debate featured Suhel Seth, Rajiv Malhotra, Arshia Sattar and Shazia Ilmi. The audience were also polled on the debate during the event, with 55.7% agreeing that culture, is the new politics, pointing on the importance of platforms such as the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival for debate.
There are plans to further expand the festival. There is set to be two further editions of JLF across the world at the Southbank Centre in London in May. Then a third JLF festival will take place at Boulder Colorado in the atutumn.
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