The Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival promoted by the Apeejay owned Oxford Book Store is to be held from 14 to 18 January 2015. The first lit fest of 2015, it will be held at select Kolkata locations with a large complement of English language authors, artists, and elite of the city. Indian speakers expected this year at the AKLF are Amrita Chowdhury, Bikram Grewal, David Davidar, Goutam Ghose, Jeet Thayil and Ashish Nandi. Among the international stars one can expect to hear from Alexis Wright, Caryl Ferey, Charles Allen, Hakan Nessar, Esther Syiem, Joanne Joria and John Elliot.
However, the lit fest that might send your pulse racing is the Crime Writers Festival in Delhi to be held on 17 and 18 January at the Amphitheatre and the Experimental Art Gallery at India Habitat Centre. The two-day festival will feature authors and filmmakers speaking about the art crime fiction writing. Aimed at budding crime fiction authors, the event will feature readings from select crime best-sellers and workshops for newbie writers to hone there skills.
The most popular genre of fiction across the world, crime fiction, has never evolved to a global level, or received active support in India in spite of huge readership. The CWF may change this. “As you know we launched the Crime Writers Association of South Asia with many of you at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2014. As with everything in life, there were many exciting twists and turns, and now out of that effort a Crime Writers Forum for South Asia has emerged, which we, the founders of the Association, believe will be an improved avatar of the original,” says co-founder of the forum, Kishwar Desai.
Top crime writers expected
Among the international speakers at the session will be author, playwright and editor, David Stuart Davies, a committee member of the Crime Writers Association and the editor of their monthly publication Red Herring. His work includes six novels featuring his wartime detective Johnny Hawke and six Sherlock Holmes novels – the latest being The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Promise. Davies is regarded as an authority on Sherlock Holmes and is the author of two plays, Sherlock Holmes: The Last Act and Sherlock Holmes: The Death and Life. He has also penned a series of dark, gritty crime novels, Brothers in Blood and Innocent Blood.
The Indian delegation will have Ashwin Sanghi who has written several best-sellers including The Rozabal Line, Chanakya’s Chant and The Krishna Key. Sanghi has co-authored an international thriller titled Private India with American author James Patterson. Amrita Chowdhury author of the art crime thriller Faking It, and Breach, a cyber thriller is also a featured speaker and panelist at the festival. Chowdhury with engineering degrees from IIT Kanpur, UC Berkeley and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon holds seven semi-conductor manufacturing US patents and is a former global strategy consultant. Currently she works in the field of publishing.
Dhritiman Chaterji, an actor who began his career as the protagonist of Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi and has worked in several hundred Bengali films represents the film world at the festival. Over the years, he has worked in Bengali, Hindi and English films with filmmakers Mrinal Sen, Aparna Sen, Jane Campion, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, Rituparno Ghosh and others. His most famous film is 36 Chowringhee Lane and most recent film is The Man Who Knew Infinity, a biopic on the mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, written and directed by Matthew Brown.
