Over the next four days, Kozhikode, the city of music, food and football will live, literally, up to its newest tag, City of Literature.
The seventh edition of the Kerala Literature Festival - the first after UNESCO named Kozhikode a City of Literature – opens on Thursday. The festival, to be held at its regular venue on the Kozhikode beach, will bring to the city an exciting list of speakers, from across the country and abroad.
This edition of the KLF will feature some 500 speakers and 300-odd sessions. The speakers include Raghuram Rajan, Kailash Satyarthi, William Dalrymple, Piyush Pandey, Prahlad Kakkar, Shashi Tharoor, Anita Nair, Perumal Murugan, Abraham Verghese, Resul Pookutty, T.M. Krishna, T.P. Sreenivasan, Mallika Sarabhai, P. Sainath, Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan, Amish Tripathi, Alka Pande, Prakash Raj, Sheela, Shakeela, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Brinda Karat, Palanivel Thiagarajan, M. Mukundan, K. Satchidanandan, Zacharia, C.V. Balakrishnan, N.S. Madhavan, S. Hareesh, Benyamin, T.D. Ramakrishnan, K.R. Meera, V.J. James, Santhosh Aechikkanam and K. Ajitha.
The festival over the years has not just been about literature. Along with discussions on books and authors, the previous editions have tackled several issues from across a variety of disciplines.
That tradition will continue: among the topics for this year’s festival are philosophy, artificial intelligence, theatre, contemporary literature, start-up and entrepreneurship.
Children’s programme is a new addition. Turkey will be the country in focus this year. And there will be cultural shows, including music and dance, as well as screening of films. But for once, the focus will be more on the written word, and it would be the writers who will be celebrated by, what should be, big crowds.
