WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

There are across the globe six or seven truly great book festivals: Hay on Wye, Sydney, the New Yorker, Mantova, Frankfurt, Adelaide, Edinburgh and St Malo. But in just eleven years, the Jaipur Literature festival has grown to overtake all of these and is now widely recognised as the world’s largest, most exciting and most influential book festival. It is moreover the only one of the A-list to be completely free and open to all.

How has Jaipur managed this in just over a decade- and in the process inspired over 300 smaller literary festivals that have sprung up like magic across South Asia? The reason I think is first and foremost the incredible amplitude of our programming.

On one hand, every year we unfailingly bring the greatest names in world literature to Jaipur: this year we host writers from almost 20 international languages and literary backgrounds, including constellations of Harvard, Yale and Oxbridge faculty as well as glittering cohorts of Nobel, Booker, Pulitzer, Sahitiya Akademi, and Samuel Johnson winners. It’s like a super-university pitching its tents in Jaipur for five days and opening its doors to all comers.

On the other hand, we bring to world attention the very greatest writers from across India, in all of this country’s fabulous diversity, in a huge variety of India’s many languages. My brilliant co-director, Namita Gokhale, every year curates a bhasha list of unrivalled breadth and depth: this year she has programmes thirty powerful writers who represent Hindi literature including celebrated names like Akhil Katyal, Anu Singh Choudhary, Ashok Vajpeyi, Avinash Das, Chitra Mudgal, Mridula Garg, Pankaj Dubey, Satya Vyas, Saurabh Dwivedi, Vinod Dua, Yatindra Mishra among others, and over 50 speakers representing 15 other major Indian languages including Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada,