Booker Prize winner Ben Okri, Arabic poet Adonis, actress-turned-novelist Esther Freud, broadcaster-publisher Charles Glass and Indian authors Jerry Pinto and Karan Mahajan are some of the names that figure in this year’s line-up of the Dhaka Lit Fest, beginning Thursday.
The seventh edition of the three-day festival will be held at the Bangla Academy in Dhaka and will see over 200 speakers, performers and thinkers, representing 23 countries, participate.
Apart from its more than 100 sessions, the festival will see the launch of the British literary journal Granta in Bangladesh, besides other book releases, film screenings and special performances.
On the last day of the festival, winners of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and Gemcon Literary Awards, the highest monetary value literary prize in Bangladesh, will be announced.
The directors of Dhaka Lit Fest are Sadaf Saaz, Ahsan Akbar and K Anis Ahmed and the event is supported by the Bangladesh’s Ministry of Culture.
The festival will be inaugurated by Bangladesh’s Minister of Cultural Affairs Asaduzzaman Noor and will be followed by a session featuring Adonis, who led the modernist movement in Arabic poetry in the second half of the 20th century.