Kerala Literature Festival 2024: Books to build bonds in India's City of Literature

The seventh edition of Kerala Literature Festival will be held in Kozhikode from January 11-14.

Kozhikode is all set to host the Kerala Literature Festival (KLF), the first after being named City of Literature by UNESCO a month ago. The seventh edition of the famous festival will be held on the beach, where Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama landed more than five centuries ago to discover a sea route to India, from January 11 to 14.

Turkey will be the guest country at the festival, last attended by half-a-million visitors in January 2023. Kozhikode, formerly Calicut, a coastal city in the Malabar region, was given the honour of City of Literature by UNESCO Creative Cities Network on World Cities Day on October 31.

Organised by the DC Kizhakemuri Foundation named after the founder of DC Books, one of the biggest publishing houses in the country, KLF will have writers from home abroad, including former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan, who will talk on his new book, Breaking the Mould: Reimagining India's Economic Future, co-authored with fellow-economist Rohit Lamba, Pune-born Devika Rege, author of the critically-acclaimed debut novel, Quarterlife, and KR Meera, the award-winning Malayalam author whose new book, Assassin, was published this year.

Author-politician Shashi Tharoor (left) with Ravi Decee (centre) of Kerala Literature Festival and Firat Sunel, author and Ambassador of Turkey to New Delhi at the curtain-raiser of KLF in the national capital on December 12.

"Kerala Literature Festival is not only a literary event but also a cultural and social intervention," said Ravi Decee, managing partner of DC Books and chief facilitator of KLF, while announcing the line-up for the seventh edition in the national capital on December 12.

Located on the coast of the Arabian Sea, Kozhikode is home to celebrated writers M T Vasudevan Nair, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, S K Pottekkatt, Balamani Amma, P Valsala, K T Mohammed and Thikkodiyan. Vasudevan Nair, 90, is among the speakers at the festival this year.

"Kozhikode is a mélange of cultural influences. Its connection to the outside world for centuries renders the city cosmopolitan," says author and politician Shashi Tharoor, who represents the Thiruvananthapuram constituency in Parliament.

A creative hub in the centre of the Malabar region, Kozhikode's composite culture has its roots in its trade and cultural exchanges with the rest of the world dating back to centuries ago. The city became a meeting point of different cultural expressions allowing art and literature to thrive. Several writers from Malabar joined the freedom struggle and literature became a movement for democracy.

Kozhikode, the venue of Kerala Literature Festival, was recently named City of Literature by UNESCO Creative Cities Network.

The guest country honour for Turkey will see several writers from the country joining speakers at the festival. "We will introduce many lesser known Turkish authors to India at KLF," says Firat Sunel, Turkey's Ambassador to India, referring to a strong following of Turkish literature, especially books by Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, in India.

"Turkey is participating in a literary festival in India as the guest country for the first time," says Ambassador Sunel, a well known author in his home country whose 2010 novel in Turkish, In the Shade of the Weeping Willows, was translated into Malayalam (Ila Pozhiyum Marathinte Nizhalukalil) last year. India was the guest country at the 40th Istanbul International Book Fair in November this year.

"Turkish literature is known to book lovers in India through translation, especially the works of Pamuk which are also available in Malayalam, and the famous Turkish poet and playwright Nâzım Hikmet. The presence of many other writers from Turkey at KLF will be an opportunity to understand the literature from the country better," says Malayalam poet K Satchidanandan, the festival director.

Among the participating authors this year are Perumal Murugan, the winner of JCB Prize for Literature this year for Fire Bird, Itanagar-based Mamang Dai, the author of the 2021 novel, Escaping the Land about the turbulent history of Arunachal Pradesh, S Hareesh, the JCB Prize for Literature 2020 winner for Moustache, and Mallika Sarabhai, dancer and current Vice-Chancellor of Kerala Kalamandalam, who wrote her memoir, In Free Fall: My Experiments With Living, last year.