10th Dhaka Lit Fest will include Nobel Prize winners Orhan Pamuk and Abdulrazak Gurnah
After a two year hiatus caused by Covid-19, the 10th edition of the Dhaka Literary Festival will take place from January 5-8, 2023, at the capital's Bangla Academy. The DLF directors have just announced 25 out of the 200 speakers to participate in the event.
Included among the speakers are Nobel Prize-winning authors Orhan Pamuk and Abdulrazak Gurnah, as well as Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell, the author and translator, respectively, of Tomb of Sand, the first Hindi language book to win an International Booker Prize in 2022. The list also includes critically acclaimed and award-winning writers Hanif Kureishi, Panka Mishra, Amitav Ghosh, Nuruddin Farah, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Tilda Swinton, Jon Lee Anderson, Onjali Rauf, Sarah Churchwell, Esther Freud, Matthieu Aikins, Alexandra Pringle, Andrey Kurkov, Asma Khan, Dame Sarah Gilbert, Anisul Hoque, Mashrur Arefin, Jaya Ahsan, Kamal Naser Chowdhury, Zafar Iqbal and Marina Tabassum.
Sadaf Saaz, writer, Producer and Co-director of the Dhaka Lit Fest, said, "The upcoming Dhaka Lit Fest will be celebrating its 10th edition with a stellar line-up of speakers, including two Nobel Prize winning-authors together in Dhaka for the first time. We will have four magical days sharing our love of reading and literature, discussing wide-ranging topics and ideas from different perspectives, as well as film screenings, live music and performances."
Ahsan Akbar, writer, and Co-director of the Dhaka Lit Fest, said, "For the past two years we have been working hard to gather some of the best minds from around the globe. With the diverse mix of speakers from home and abroad, we are excited to host an unforgettable festival of scintillating conversations. The long-awaited 10th edition of DLF will be very special!"
"We are committed to our core values as ever, and with our 10th edition we will continue to celebrate pluralism of both identities and ideas and champion the freedom to express," said K Anis Ahmed, writer, and Co-director of the Dhaka Lit Fest.
DLF directors Sadaf Saaz, Ahsan Akbar and K Anis Ahmed began the Dhaka Lit Fest in 2011 with the commitment to promoting Dhaka, and Bangladeshi literature and culture to the world.
The festival is focused primarily on literature, but embraces culture and ideas more broadly, generating discussions on a wide array of topics: fiction and literary non-fiction to history, politics and society; poetry and translations; science and mathematics; philosophy and religion.
About 400 participants representing over 50 countries have been part of DLF, including VS Naipaul, Adonis, Vikram Seth, Tariq Ali, Ahdaf Soueif, William Dalrymple, Nayantara Sahgal, Tilda Swinton, Shashi Tharoor, Shobha De, Nandita Das, Vijay Seshadri and Mohammed Hanif. Stalwarts of Bangla literature, Syed Shamsul Huq, Hasan Azizul Huq, Selina Hossain, Debesh Roy, Nirmalendu Goon, Joy Goswami, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay and others, have also graced the stage.
A diverse mix of conversations and dialogues, film screenings, art exhibitions, music, and cultural shows is expected in 2023's four-day event. A press conference, followed by the release of the full program two weeks before the event, will follow.