Jaipur Literary Festival to return to Houston on 15 Sept featuring Mira Nair; to explore Ukraine war, cosmology

The 6th edition of the Jaipur Literary Festival will be organised in Houston this year, featuring various celebrated writers, analysts, and researchers, including award-winning filmmaker Mira Nair. The JLF festival hailed as one of the greatest literary shows globally, will be held in Houston 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.

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.

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.

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.

Before heading to Houston, JLF had enriching sessions in New York on September 12 and 13 which had luminaries like Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Vijay Sheshadri, Mathematician and novelist Manil Suri, Sahitya Academy Award-winning poet and author Arundhati Subramaniam, amongst others.

After JLG Houston, the ninth edition of JLF Boulder Colorado will be held from 21 September to 23 September.