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

"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.