The ZJLF, which began in 2006, is the largest free literary festival in the world, commemorating national and intentional writers. The festival covers a wide range of literary practices from film, music, theatre and literature. This year, the list of attendees and speakers includes APJ Abdul Kalam, Jung Chang, Lucy-Hughes Hallett, Prasoon Joshi, Paul Theroux, Elizabeth Gilbert and Naseeruddin Shah.
The eighth edition of the five–day ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival (ZJLF) is all set to kick off with a special curtain raiser in the city. Indian English author-academic and Sahitya Akademi Awardee Amit Chaudhuri will be discussing his latest novel Odysseus Abroad in a conversation with poet, novelist, journalist and DNA India's editor-in-chief CP Surendran.
Odysseus Abroad tells the story of a day when "nothing happens and everything happens". With strong influences from James Joyce's Ulysses and Homer's Odysseus, Chaudhuri regales the tale of Ananda, a young literature student in London in the mid-eighties, and his impossible uncle Rangamma. Struggling with the shift from an upper middle class Indian lifestyle to one of a commoner, Ananda forms an unlikely bond with his uncle, who lacks basic hygiene and recklessly squanders away his very handsome pension. Chaudhuri has loosely based his characters on the relationship he shares with a maternal uncle, making the book almost autobiographical. A fart and a conversation about a Souza painting in the-80's with this eccentric uncle led to Odysseus Abroad, says the author.
Chaudhuri is an award-winning author, scholar, and musician. He has written five novels, one work of non-fiction and a number of books of literary criticism. He received the Commonwealth Literature Prize and Betty Trask Prize for A Strange and Sublime Address, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Freedom Song, and Infosys Prize for Humanities- Literary Studies for his literary criticism. He was also awarded India's highest literary honour, the Sahitya Akademi Award, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia. The author grew up in Bombay and divides his time between Kolkata and Norwich. In 2008, this Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature was included in the panel for the Man Booker International Prize 2008, alongside writer Jane Smiley and essayist Andrey Kurkov.
Once a Leverhulme Fellow at Cambridge University, visiting faculty at Columbia University and Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. Chaudhuri is also an Indian classical musician, and singer and composer of Indo-Western experimental music, with an album from each of these genres. His project in experimental music, This is not Fusion, combines raga, jazz, the blues, rock, techno, disco, and Indian pop.
The ZJLF, which began in 2006, is the largest free literary festival in the world, commemorating national and intentional writers. The festival covers a wide range of literary practices from film, music, theatre and literature. This year, the list of attendees and speakers includes APJ Abdul Kalam, Jung Chang, Lucy-Hughes Hallett, Prasoon Joshi, Paul Theroux, Elizabeth Gilbert and Naseeruddin Shah. In the past, the festival has played host to internationally-acclaimed writers such as Orhan Pamuk, Ian McEwan, Kiran Desai, Vikram Seth and Shashi Tharoor.
(The talk will be held today at 6 pm at Essar House in Mahalaxmi, Mumbai)
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