Man Booker Prize winning author Kiran Desai has been invited to participate in the Prague Writers' Festival (PWF) this year, alongwith ten other celebrated authors from several countries.
Desai, who won the prize for "The Inheritance of Loss" in 2006 and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award the next year, was born in Chandigarh and is the daughter of the well-known Indian novelist Anita Desai. Kiran Desai lives in New York.
Others invited to participate include taxi-driving novelist Iva Pekárková, Colson Whitehead, Seymour Hersh, Mark Slouka, Cletus Nelson Nwadike and Abolghasem Esmailpour.
Veteran Indian journalist and author Inderjit Badhwar has been invited to moderate one of the sessions at the PWF. The festival's website, which calls Badhwar a "badass, crusading, irrepressible journalist" says he will introduce Desai and Hersh and moderate the American Dream conversation. Delhi-based Badhwar, a former editor of India Today, now heads India Legal magazine and is Editorial Advisor to APN TV.
The six-day annual literary conclave, to be held at the "City of Spires" from October 3, has the theme of "Live-Evil" -- a commentary on the darkness that appears to be overwhelming the political and social spheres of our everyday world and our apparent acceptance of it, according to a release issued by India Legal.
The release quotes poet Michael March and president of PWF as saying: "Evil has been with us since the beginning of time. Perhaps evil is the beginning of time. Time with a human face. In the form of governments."
Hersh, who once worked with The New York Times, is counted as America's top investigative reporter who won a Pulitzer for his expose of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968 and whose expose of Henry Kissinger in "The Price of Power" became a runaway bestseller. He also exposed the chilling brutality of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.
Previous invitees of Indian origin to the PWF include Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy. Other literary giants who have featured in the past include Harold Pinter, William Styron, Nadine Gordimer, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and John Banville.
--IANS
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