Award winning writers at JLF

This year the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) sees a host of Man Booker winners and nominees including the current and first and only American to have been awarded the prestigious prize, Paul Beatty.

Hip-hop poet and novelist Paul Beatty was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2016 for his caustic satire on racial politics, ‘The Sellout’, in which he ‘plunges into the heart of contemporary American society with savage wit’.

The panel of judges compared the 54-year-old Los Angeles born writer to Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift, with chair Amanda Foreman called it a “novel for our times”, particularly in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement.

In conversation with Meru Gokhale, Paul Beatty will be discussing comedy and controversy, racism and history, poetry and fiction.

A second Man Booker awardee Alan Hollinghurst, author of five novels, including ‘The Swimming-Pool’ ‘Library’ and ‘The Line of Beauty’, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2004 will be at Jaipur; with a new novel due to be published in the summer of 2017 this bestselling Booker-winning English novelist, poet, short story writer and translator will be talking about his life and work with Chandrahas Choudhury.

Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan has been bracketed by critics with great storytellers like Rushdie and Márquez. Originally written in Bahasa Indonesian, his novel, the International Man Booker Prize-nominated ‘Man Tiger’ and ‘Beauty Is a Wound’, have been translated into Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Malay. In conversation with noted translator Deborah Smith, he will discuss his literary universe and sources of inspiration.

Richard Flanagan is considered by many to be the finest Australian novelist of his generation. His six novels are published in 42 countries and he was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2014 for ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’.

He joins Manu Joseph to discuss his life and work as well as joining other writers in a panel which looks at whether printed fiction can compete with movies and television with David Hare, Alan Hollinghurst, Neil Jordan and Ritesh Batra.

Mei Fong is believed to be the first Malaysian to win a Pulitzer. Formerly a Wall Street Journal China correspondent, she is an award-winning writer whose commentaries on China are world leading.

She will discuss China in the 21st Century and whether through the scale of its growth it is an unstable entity waiting to explode or owner of this era globally.

Suhasini Haidar will introduce a session in which Fong will talk about the true cost of the controversial one-child policy drawing on eight years spent documenting its repercussions.

Australian Sebastian Smee won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2011. He is the author of ‘The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships’, ‘Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art’, which explores the fascinating story of four pairs of artists – Manet and Degas, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, Freud and Bacon.

Famed Rajasthani writer Hari Ram Meena has written eight books in Hindi, including collections of poems, travelogues and the novel ‘Dhuni Tape Teer’.

He has also edited a collection of tribal poetry and forefronts the narratives and histories of the marginalised tribal communities.

He is the recipient of the Rajasthan Sahitya Akademi’s highest Meera Award, the Mahapandit Rahul Sankratyayan Award by Kendriya Hindi Sansthan, the 2012 Bihari Award by the KK Birla Foundation and the 2015 World Hindi Conference Award.

He joins one of the foremost Hindi writers of his generation, Ajay Navaria to discuss literature and the redeeming narratives of assertion and transformation.

Naseem Shafaie was born and brought up in Kashmir and began writing Kashmiri poetry in 1988. She is the author of ‘Open Window’ and ‘Neither Shadow Nor Reflection’, which won the Tagore Award for Excellence in Literature and the Sahitya Akademi Award.

She is the first Kashmiri female writer to receive both awards. She will join Dhrubajvoti Bora and Ornit Shani to discuss the voices of women in war zones around the world, and Neerja Mattoo and Neelesh Misra to read from their work and share their experiences of violence, strife and discord.

SL Bhyrappa has been the bestselling novelist in Kannada for the past 50 years, in Marathi translation for the last two decades and one of the top five bestselling authors in Hindi translation.

Bhyrappa has written 24 novels, most of which have been translated into nearly all the Indian languages as well as English.

Bhyrappa is the recipient of five honorary doctorates by universities in Karnataka, a Sahitya Akademi Award, the Sarawati Samman and various other national awards.

He joins Vivek Shanbhag to discuss his extraordinary life as a railway porter, a religious monk and a professor of literature, and his literary career.