A VERY FESTIVE FESTIVAL

Held at the Diggi Palace in India’s Pink City, the Jaipur Literature Festival is hugely popular, not least because it’s free: in 2010 it drew an estimated 30,000 people, a third of them from overseas. Led by the travel writer William Dalrymple and the novelist-publisher Namita Gokhale, it lays on a spicy variety of speakers, including Richard Ford, J.M. Coetzee, Mohsin Hamid, Kiran Desai, Kamila Shamsie, Jung Chang, Martin Amis and Orhan Pamuk.

Jaipur, Dalrymple says, “really is a festival. The buildings are festooned with streamers, thousands of people mill around, we let off fireworks at night, and after 6.30 the writers have to shut up and give over to music and dancing.”

~ ANTHONY GARDNER

DSC Jaipur Literature Festival January 21st to 25th

Picture Credit: lamoney (via Flickr)