Sunday Times 2
The literary empire strikes back
View(s):Every January I return to South Asia to experience an assault on all my senses by two of the best-attended English language literary festivals in the world. From January 14 to 17, 2016, the Galle Literary Festival will be held in a restored Dutch Fort on the southern tip of Sri Lanka. The historic Diggi Palace in the fabled “Pink City” of Jaipur, India, is the venue of the Jaipur Literature Festival, which runs from January 21 to 25, 2016.
Gore Vidal at GLF 2008
The thousands that attend the Jaipur Literature Festival are not at all reticent to challenge ideas, opinions and ideology expressed in author interviews, panel discussions and readings. Quite often the authors and panellist seem to be quite taken aback by the audience’s familiarity with the subject matter and the alternate formulations that are vey politely offered.
The 2016 Jaipur Literature Festival will be headlined by Margaret Attwood, Marlon James who won the Man Booker Prize in 2015 for his epic and visceral novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, and acclaimed historian and Massey Lecture Presenter Margaret Macmillan who also serves as the Warden of St. Anthony’s College at the University of Oxford.
The Jaipur Festival is as famous for the authors who have attended, including Hanif Kureishi, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Ian McEwan, J.M. Coetzee, Mohammed Hanif, Orhan Pamuk, Pico Iyer, Vikram Seth and Wole Soyinka, as it is for the Indian government’s banning of Sir Salman Rushdie – on the grounds that Rushdie’s presence would lead to civil chaos because his book, The Satanic Verses, is regarded by Muslim extremists as sacrilegious.
Not only was Rushdie banned from attending the festival, but the organisers’ contingency plan to have Rushdie participate by video link was cancelled, at the last minute, when religious extremists invaded the festival venue and threatened to burn it down.
One of the more unique aspects of the Jaipur Literature Festival is that it is entirely free of charge because it has always had major corporate sponsors. For the last three years the giant ZEE TV network has sponsored the festival.
At the Galle Literary Festival in 2008, I was able to talk with American writer and political commentator Gore Vidal. When we met on the final day of the festival Vidal was still waiting for his airline to find his luggage. He was dressed in borrowed clothes from the festival founder Geoffrey Dobbs, three sizes too big.
We had all just finished lunch at a table that included the long-time resident of Sri Lanka Arthur C. Clark, author of 2001, A Space Odyssey and other science fiction bestsellers. And it seemed like Vidal his old friend was very fragile and fading. Clark passed away two months later.
Commenting on the ambitions of a then relatively unknown junior American senator from the state of Illinois, Vidal confidently and in hindsight very wrongly predicted that “the Clintons will steam-roller” Barack Obama. History certainly proved Vidal wrong.
The 2011 Galle Literary Festival offered space for people from the Sri Lankan communities to come together and enjoy a free exchange of ideas just two years after the end of a decades-long brutal ethnic conflict. Sandya Eknaligoda, the wife of missing journalist Prageeth Eknaligoda, attended the 2011 Galle Literary Festival wearing black masking tape over her mouth to symbolise the repression of freedom of expression.
Due to the lack of the same degree of corporate sponsorships, the Galle Literary Festival is not entirely free of charge but does offer value for money with its excellent array of authors and panels. Sri Lankan-born Canadian author Shyam Selvadurai has curated the festival in recent years.
Over the years the Galle Literary Festival had authors as diverse as Richard Dawkins, Sakuntala Sachithanandan, Lawrence Hill, Gillian Slovo, Sir Tom Stoppard, Candace Bushnell and Randy Boyagoda. The 2016 Galle Literary Festival will be featuring Sebastian Faulks, Meera Syal, Hugh Thomson, Sonali Deraniyagala and Mona Arshi among others. Deraniyagala wrote a devastating memoir, “Wave” – about losing her husband, two children, and parents in the 2004 tsunami.
The festival will also be hosting international poetry heavy weights: 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner Gregory Pardlo, New York Times Bestseller and Forward Prize winner Claudia Rankine, along with Sri Lankan poet Vivimarie Vanderpooten. Famed children’s author Andy Stanton, the creator of the beloved Mr. Gum series, as well as best-selling historian Tom Holland and former BBC South Asia correspondent Mark Tully will be speaking at the festival.
Authors from the South Asian region who will be at the Galle Literary Festival include Anuradha Roy, Jeet Thayil, Sayed Islam, Samanth Subramanian , and Omar Musa, as well as the 2012 Commonwealth Prize and the $50,000 DSC Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka, along with Sri Lankan poets Ariyawansa Ranaweera and Jayatilaka Kammallaweera.
The Galle Literary Festival will culminate with the awarding of the Fairway National Literary Award for the best Sri Lankan author and the $50,000 DSC prize for South Asian Literature.
(Viresh Fernando is a Toronto-based lawyer and freelance writer)