Mumbai's biggest literature festival, Tata Literature Live, is set to return to the city for its 7th edition in November featuring writers and thinkers from across the globe including Amitav Ghosh, John Gray, Ramachandra Guha and Shashi Tharoor among others.
The four-day festival, starting 17th November, will take place simultaneously at the National Centre for the Performing Arts and the iconic Prithvi Theatre.
Witnessing over 130 celebrated writers and thinkers from over 30 countries, the event will be a potpourri of plays, performance poetry, and storytelling. Music too will be an integral part of the festival.
This years iteration features Frank Moorhouse, Ma Thida, Sanjaya Baru, P Chidambaram, Jairam Ramesh, Girish Karnad, Anuvab Pal, Keki Daruwalla, Kiran Nagarkar and Jayant Narlikar, among others. Legendary lyricist and poet, Gulzar, and the film director and producer, Karan Johar, will lend the festival a flavour of Bollywood.
"We are thrilled to bring to the audiences of Mumbai and the country, the first glimpse of this annual literature fiesta.
"More authors will be announced at the end of this month with the full programme revealed in November," Founder and Festival Director Anil Dharker said.
The festival will witness the Hindi edition of the play "White Rabbit Red Rabbit" by the Iranian playwright, Nassim Soleimanpour, where actor and audience discover the script together.
Also on the line-up is Dalit singer and activist Bant Singh who will be in conversation with poet Nirupama Dutt in an hour-long evening session interspersed with songs, conversations and storytelling.
Singer Vidya Shah's lecture demonstration on women performers of the the early twentieth century is also on the cards.
Workshops this year, curated for both adults and children, will feature international writers and poets undertaking sessions on fiction, theatre and poetry.
For adults, these include Writing Biographies by John Zubrzycki, Writing Horror Fiction by Darryl Jones, Poetry from Brazil by Angelica Freitas, Writing Drama for Radio by Sue Roberts, Lens to Lens, a session on photojournalism by Sandor Jaszberenyi, and Machine Plays, the art of performing plays without rehearsals by Nassim Soleimanpour.
For children, the sessions feature Worlds within Words, a multi-lingual poetry workshop by Adrian Grima, Yolanda Castano and Sampurna Chattarji, How to draw everything, a workshop on illustration of stories by Gillian Johnson and Story'xpress, a storytelling session for lesser privileged children.
The event this year has also introduced three new awards -- the Big Little Book Awards for Author and Illustrator in the Literature-for-children category, and the Sultan Padamsee Award for Playwriting.
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