Stage set for cerebral fireworks: Pankaj Kapur, Rajat Gupta to open Bangalore Literature Festival on November 9

Verse Interruption will see Arundhathi Subramaniam, Mani Rao, Karthika Nair, Prathibha Nandakumar, Navdeep Suri, Harpreet Singh, Manish Mundra, Sanjukta Dasgupta and Hussain Haidry bring their poems to the mike.

New stars on the non-fiction horizon Tony Joseph and Ashok Alexander will be here along with veteran fiction writers like Purushottam Agrawal and Mridula Garg. Malayalam writers Unni R and Johny Miranda will talk about their craft to journalist-writer CK Meena.

Thriller effect will be provided by Ravi Subramanian (all those banks and bankers in his books!), Bilal Siddiqi (Bard of Blood), Sunanda Mehta (the book on Sunanda Pushkar) and Sumankumar (The Family Man). Bestseller effect will be courtesy Anuja Chauhan, Preeti Shenoy and Ravinder Singh. New voices include Keshava Guha with Accidental Magic and Anukrti Upadhyay with Bhaunri.

Jagriti Theatre will put up a Jane Austen presentation and Revanta Sarabhai will comment on climate change via dance while Max Mueller’s virtual reality experience on a Kafka character will be on all day. Survivor stories from the Brussels terror attacks’ face Nidhi Chaphekar and Reshma Qureshi who faced an acid attack. Jonathan Gil Harris will evoke the Bard with his one-man show Masala Shakespeare even as Manjari Chaturvedi brings us The Courtesan Project.

The children’s programming, nicely woven together by storyteller Vikram Sridhar, will see drum jams, a clown from Spain and everything under the sun. Plus, the lovely Janaki Sabesh will enact her stories in her own unique way.

Two concerts to be enjoyed in the cool evening air – The Thayir Sadam Project and Manasi and Friends – put together with much TLC by BLF’s music curator Sadhana Rao.

Over 230 speakers and artistes across six venues, including three for children called Abracadabra, Khul Ja Sim Sim, Shazam. The two main stages are named differently this year too – remembering Bangalore’s very own Girish Karnad who passed away this year, these are titled after his plays: Yayati and Tughlaq. The Red Couch, a cozier, more intimate space, which aims to cut the distance between writer and readers will see much frenzy, what with a bunch of readings and book launches set to happen here.

A community-funded fest, with only a passionate team of volunteers at the steering wheel. Calling all bookworms to BLF!