As the tenth edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival gets underway on January 19, here are some of the writers who are expected to expand the discourse.
Bee Rowlatt
Rowlatt is a British writer and journalist. In her latest book, In Search of Mary, she retraces pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft’s journey through Scandinavia.
In 1796, Wollstonecraft – best known for writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – published a travelogue called Letters from Norway, chronicling a journey she had taken the previous year, her toddler in tow, to locate a missing cargo of silver in order to regain her lover’s waning affections.
Rowlatt recreates the journey – her own toddler accompanying her – and in the process, pays homage to Wollstonecraft’s life and legacy. In an article in The Telegraph about the book, Rowlatt writes: “We found out the precise locations, the places where Wollstonecraft poured her heart into the poignant letters. A baby in a buggy with a woman reading aloud under an umbrella in the rain may not be your traditional seance. But I felt we were invoking her spirit, reading her words in the very place they were conceived.”
In a review of the book in The Independent, Peter Carty writes, “Rowlatt’s travelogue is always entertaining as she explores the life and times of the ever passionate and never compromising Wollstonecraft who, more than two centuries on, still has much to teach us.”
Rowlatt will be part of a panel featuring Emma Sky, Hyeonseo Lee, Rosalyn D’Mello and Samanth Subramanian on the art of the memoir.
Ashok Ferrey
Described on the festival’s website as “Sri Lanka’s biggest selling author in English”, Ferry is the author of five books, four of which have been shortlisted for the prestigious Gratiaen Prize.
His latest book, a novel titled The Ceaseless Chatter of Demons, is about Sonny Mahadewala, who “lives a dual life”: one in England with his American wife, and one in a big house belonging to his family in Kandy, where his mother believes that he is possessed by demons (thanks to the fact that he is considered “ugly”).
“Demons and the devil himself circumscribe the playing field of this book, whether seated in the draughty chapels of Oxford or roaming the Kandyan countryside and, through their clever interplay, they speak of larger horrors with able grace,” says a review. Alexander McCall Smith has called the novel “a triumph.”
Ferrey will be in conversation with Kyoko Yoshida, Marina Perezagua and Sunil Sethi on “Fiction and the Spaces in Between.”
Alexandra Büchler
The Czech director of Literature Across Frontiers, which facilitates “literary exchange, translation, and policy debate,” is the editor of the Arc Publications poetry anthology series, New Voices from Europe and Beyond, as well as six anthologies of short fiction.
She is a prolific translator of books of fiction and poetry, and has translated more than twenty-five books, including works by authors such as JM Coetzee, David Malouf, Janice Galloway, Gail Jones and Janette Turner Hospital.
Speaking of the lack of diversity in the British literary and publishing scene, she said in an interview, “European readers grow up with literature in translation, it is part of the literary canon. This is emphatically not the case in the English-speaking world and will probably never be, but here has been some progress and more diversity in the publication and reception of translated literature.”
Büchler will be in conversation with Angelica Freitas, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Eluned Gramich, Inga Žolude, Issa Asgarally, Pierre Joris, Roman Simić and Rumena Buzarovska in a panel titled “In Many Tongues: Voices from Brazil, Iceland, Wales, Latvia, Mauritius, Luxembourg, Croatia and Macedonia.”
Eka Kurniawan
The works of this Indonesian author and graphic designer have been translated into more than two dozen languages. He writes short fiction, novels, essays and film scripts.
In 2016, Kurniawan became the first Indonesian writer to be nominated for the Man Booker International Prize for his novel Man Tiger, a slim volume “set in a small town on the Indonesian coast.” It centers around the character of Margio, a young man within whom a supernatural white tigress resides.
Translator and publisher Deborah Smith, with whom Kurniawan will be in conversation at the Festival this year, said in her Guardian review of the novel, “Kurniawan’s writing demonstrates an affinity with literary heavyweights such as, yes, García Márquez and Dostoevsky, as well as Indonesia’s own social-realist master Pramoedya Ananta Toer, to whom domestic fans have dubbed him an heir. Most intriguing, though, is the influence of the home-grown pulp fiction that was popular when he was growing up in West Java.”
“Man Tiger is tight, focussed and thrilling. Like a good crime novel, Man Tiger works best when read in a single sitting, and its propulsive suspense is all the more remarkable because Kurniawan reveals both victim and murderer in the first sentence,” writes Jon Fasman in the New York Times review of the novel.
Marina Perezagua
A Spanish writer who teaches at the State University of New York, she is the author of two short story collections, Criaturas abisales and Leche, and two novels Yoro and Don Quijote de Manhattan. Her work has also been published in several literary magazines.
According to the festival website, Perezagua’s collection Leche and her novel Yoro “...are set to be translated into Japanese, German, Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Polish and English.” She received the Prize Príncipe de Asturias 2013 for her first Criaturas abisales. She received the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in 2016 for Yoro.
She will be on a panel with Javier Montes, Marcos Giralt Torrente, Sheila Cremaschi and Guillermo Rodriguez on “Marks of Identity: the Romance of Spanish”.
Mei Fong
The Malaysian-Chinese-American journalist has won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, as well as a Human Rights Press Award from Amnesty International and the Hong Kong Correspondents Club for her work. The festival website says that she is “...believed to be the first Malaysian to win a Pulitzer.”
Fong has also written a book about China’s one-child policy. She has been a staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, and a contributor to the LA Times, Salon, and The Atlantic.
A Guardian review of her book says, “Fong’s fine book is a moving and at times harrowing account of the significance of decisions taken by a small coterie of men (no women) with too much faith in science and ideology, and too little in humanity.”
“The policy itself remains a monument to official callousness, and Fong’s book pays moving testimony to the suffering and forbearance of its victims,” says a review in the New York Times.
She will be in conversation with Suhasini Haidar about the book.
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