The Dhaka Lit Fest will kick off on Thursday with more than 500 dignitaries, including internationally acclaimed writers and speakers, after a gap of three years.
The four-day festival consisting of 175 sessions will take place at the Bangla Academy under the supervision of three directors Sadaf Saaz, Ahsan Akbar and Kazi Anis Ahmed. Visitors are required to buy tickets to the festival that will continue until Jan 8.
The dignitaries include winners of the Booker and International Booker Prize, Oscar, Waterstones Children's Book Prize and Aga Khan Award.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Nuruddin Farah, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Tilda Swinton, Jon Lee Anderson, Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell are among the participants, according to Sadaf.
The event will have diversified programmes of dialogue, sessions on science and technology, children’s sessions, film, theatre, music and cultural presentations, reports bdnews24.com.
“We view the Lit Fest as a festival of ideas. Literature is the main focus, but we’ll discuss films as well,” said Kazi Anis Ahmed, one of the directors of the fest.
Sarah Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology at Oxford University and inventor of the AstraZeneca vaccine, will speak on science and pandemics, he said.
In a special initiative, two Rohingya poets have been invited to the fest as it tries to focus on presenting the languages of smaller ethnic groups.
The fest was suspended for the last three years due to the coronavirus pandemic, said Ahsan Akbar, one of the directors. “We decided to invite Sarah Gilbert to talk about the pandemic. We can discuss how to prevent future pandemics.”