Litfest now has genres; Kolkata bookshop to start with event on crime fiction

Discover the art of crime writing at Kolkata Crime Writers’ Festival, featuring workshops, author sessions, and a short story competition.

If crime is followed by punishment, good crime writing is followed by publication: this is what young participants will essentially learn at the Kolkata Crime Writers’ Festival — a first of its kind event in the city — being organised by a bookshop run by a woman who home-delivered books even during the COVID-19 lockdown.

The festival will take place on March 29 at the bookshop, Storyteller, which has hosted celebrated authors such as Amitav Ghosh, William Dalrymple, Ruskin Bond, and Geetanjali Shree in the recent past.

“We will be celebrating the difficult art of writing crime stories that are ever so popular in books, films, audio stories and now on OTT,” Mayura Misra, who runs Storyteller, said. Ms. Misra is organising the festival along with writer Amrita Mukherjee.

“We will have a crime-writing workshop for school kids from Class 8 onwards conducted by journalist-turned-author Arindam Basu. We have already launched an online crime short story writing competition. The prizes will be given away on the day of the festival and winning entries will be published on readomania.com. There will be very interesting author sessions. Some are really very different and we want to keep that a surprise. Then we have people from the film-OTT world talking about writing for screen as well,” Ms. Misra said.

She said she and Ms. Mukherjee had been toying with the idea for some time now because crime stories are now highly popular, not only in print but also on screen. “Finally we got around to launching it. We thought we will start small this year then grow with time. Ever since we made the announcement, we are getting such good response from writers, publishers and readers that we feel it will be a big success from the word go. Kolkatans are discerning readers. This is one city where people love to read a good book, watch a good film and a crime web series becomes a talking point in drawing room conversations,” she said.

When asked how good an idea it was to encourage children into imagining crime stories, Ms. Misra said, “The crime-writing workshop is for young adults from age 13 and above. Personally, I used to read crime and detective magazines in high school and was very eager to know what was going on in the mind of the killer. I loved watching Silence of the Lambs and was fascinated by Charles Sobhraj. Kids of today have more imaginative minds, many more ideas, more exposure and more stories. So that’s why we should include them in the Crime Writers’ Festival.”

Ms. Mukherjee added, “Feluda is a children’s book and so are Three Investigators, Famous Five, Secret Seven. This workshop is for 13-year-olds and older, so it’s for children who are already reading Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. Crime writing can develop mystery solving skills, imagination, critical thinking and most importantly you have to plug all the loopholes in a crime story for that you really need to think and write in a believable way. Associating crime writing with only blood and gore is unfair. A child can write a story about how his pet was kidnapped and how he solved the mystery and got it back.”