70 authors to take part in Kolkata Literature Festival

Kolkata: Around 70 writers from various countries will be deliberating on contemporary issues and challenges faced by literature in the 5th Kolkata Literature Festival to be held from February 8 to 10, organisers said.

There would be 22 literary sessions at the literary meet to be held at the International Kolkata Book Fair ground here in three days, director of the festival Sujata Sen told a press meet today.

There will be a team of 10 French writers who will be participating in the literature festival as France is the theme country in this edition of the book fair.

Issues such as crime thrillers dominating the present Scottish literature, cross-cultural influences on contemporary literature, poets emerging as performers before present age audiences and bloggers getting celebrity writer status in the digital age would come up at the sessions.

Besides, literature and social media becoming platform for voices of different communities, challenges faced by literature from tweets and digital media too would feature in the list of topics of discussion, Sen said.

There will also be sessions on women who live in shadows, Hindi poems, how mythology is being retold in modern Indian literature, she said.

The participants will include Graeme Macrae Burnet, one of the best selling writers of Scotland, Jenny Brown, Chair of the Bloody Scotland Crime writing festival, Anand Neelakantan, author of Bahubali trilogy, and former minister Margaret Alva among others.

The literature festival will be inaugurated by popular Bengali writer Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay on February 8.