The Los Angeles-based author bagged the pound 50,000 prize for his novel, The Sellout, in October, becoming the first American to win it
Paul Beatty, fresh off his Man Booker Prize win, will be the star draw at the upcoming Zee Jaipur Literature Festival which begins January 19 next year. The Los Angeles-based author bagged the pound 50,000 prize for his novel, The Sellout, in October, becoming the first American to win it.
Beatty heads a list of around 250 best-selling, award-winning authors, filmmakers, politicians, journalists, historians, professors, etc who’ll make it to the festival which completes 10 years this year. Among them are Alice Walker, the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction; Anne Waldman, a leading American poet; and Booker winners Alan Hollinghurst (2004) and Richard Flanagan (2014).
Margo Jefferson, whose Negroland sketches a picture of a black society very different from the dysfunctioning, poverty-stricken stereotype one encounters generally, also makes her debut appearance at Jaipur this year. As do Eka Kurniawan, the first Indonesian to be nominated for a Man Booker International Prize this year for Beauty is a Wound.
Also, NoViolet Bulawayo, the first Zimbabwean author to be nominated for the Man Booker for her novel, We Need New Names.
The Indian writers in English brigade is a little thin this year featuring, among others, Vikram Chandra, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Manju Kapoor, Keki Daruwalla, Manu Joseph, Raghu Karnad, Arshia Sattar, Ashwin Sanghi, and others. A surprise participant is Naseem Shafaie, the first Kashmiri female writer to get a Sahitya Akademi award last year.
ZEE JLF generally is strong on film glamour, and this year the star attractions will be Rishi Kapoor, and Aishwarya Dhanush, Rajinikant’s daughter. From the international community, there’ll be directors Neil Jordan The Crying Game and Stephen Frears Dangerous Liaisons, The Queen - both first-timers at the festival.
Look out also for Chinese writer Mei Fong, who’s written a book on China’s one-child policy; former US ambassador to India Robert Blackwill; and Hyeonseo Lee, a North Korean defector living in Seoul, who has recently come out with her memoirs. The sessions with Korean-born economist Ha-Joon Chang, author of 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, will generate interest, as will the ones with Newsnight’s long time presenter Jeremy Paxman, whose abrasive interviewing style is supposed to have been the template for Arnab Goswami.
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