This year marks the 9th year of the Kolkata Literature Festival.

 

The Kolkata Literature Festival is also probably the only lit fest that is held within a large book fair. It was started as an endeavour to cater to the growing book lovers and bring them closer to their authors but now it has also grown to open up doors for international literature and bring in visibility. 

Over the years, we have hosted more than 25 countries at our Literature Festival with an average international participation of 6-7 countries per year.

 

Every year 65-70 authors, from all over India and abroad participate in the festival. We had Amartya Sen, Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Sanjib Chattopadhyay, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Prof Richard Gordon, Prof Bashabi Fraser, Chrys Salt, Giles Abbot, Chetan Bhagat, Samares Mazumdar, Ashoke Vajpeyi, Mohan Agashe, Ranjan Bandyopadhyay, Anuja Chauhan, Margaret Alva, Devdutt Pattanaik, Vikram Sampath, Amit Chaudhuri, Prof Homi Bhaba, Kunal Basu, Sugata Basu, Vishal Bharadwaj, Arunava Sinha, Vivek Shanbhag, Bedabrata Pyne, Shobhaa De, Nandana Sen, Sudha Murthy, Shyam Benegal, Amol Palekar, Ashwin Sanghi,Mahesh Dattani, Durjoy Datta, Preeti Shenoy, Amrita Mukherjee, Saikat Majumdar, Novoneel Chakraborty, Pandit Ajay Chakraborty, Kalikaprasad, Amaan Ali Khan, Ayaan Ali Khan, V. Karthika, Vaishali Mathur, Bikash Neogi, Jash Sen, Pracheta Gupta, Nachiketa, Srijato, Alokranjan Dasgupta, Subodh Sarkar, Binayak Bandyopadhyay, Sujoy Ghosh, Suman Ghsoh, Abir Chatterjee and many others. 

 

We have also been lucky to host international Man Booker shortlisted author Graeme Macrae Burnet, Val Mc Dermid. The Lion author, Saroo Brierly. Preti Taneja of We That are Young and Maya Jasanoff of The Dawn Watch. 

We have a strong presence of stalwarts of Bengali literature. From late Nirendranath Chakraborty to Sankha Ghosh, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Sanjib Chattopadhyay and Samaresh Majumdar, Bani Basu, everyone has supported us with their presence. We also have more contemporary faces like Srijato Bandyopadhyay, Bratya Basu, Tilottama Majumdar.

We have got support from all the leading Indian publishing presses as well, Westland, Penguin India, Harper Collins, Hachette among others. 

 

We have also hosted a number of international programs on the KLF stage. The Village, The city and the Valley project with Wales, the Bridges Beyond Boundaries project with Scotland and British Council and Bonjour India closing ceremony with France and the French book office. 

Every day, KLF has a musical ending. We had performances of Kalikaprasad, Tanushree Shankar Dance Academy, Pandit Ajoy Chakraborty, Mamata Shankar, Dona Ganguly, Usha Uthup, Amaan Ali Khan, Ayaan Ali Khan, Rupam Islam, Surajit, Soumyojit and Sourendra, Pandit Tejendra Narayan Majumdar and many others.