Smorgasbord of sessions at Alliance Literary Festival 4.0 in Bengaluru

The fourth edition of the Alliance Literary Festival that begins this week celebrates much more than literature

“This festival is essentially a celebration of ideas and culture, and is themed The Asian Century. We’ve had three editions of the festival before,” says Anirudh Sridhar, Dean of Thought Leadership, Department of Language and Literature, Alliance University, Bengaluru.

Alliance University’s festival of literature, culture and intellectual dialogue — the Alliance Literary Festival (ALF) — will take place from February 13 to 15 at their central campus at Chikkahadage cross on the Chandapura-Anekal main road. The three-day festival will see the participation of over 120 speakers from as many as 25 countries.

“Our first edition was on the brave new world that was just emerging after the pandemic and all kinds of things were happening on the global scene. Within Asia, geopolitics had realigned itself significantly in the last few years,” says Anirudh, adding the continent exuded agrowing ability to influence the actions of the rest of the world.

“However, since it is a literary festival, it was not going to be about geopolitics, but about culture, sports, movies, and of course, novelists. We wanted to look around the world for where the cultural influence of Asia was the strongest.”

Anirudh admits that since it was “a hugely layered and debatable question,” the organisers decided on a strong contingent of Japanese speakers.

“To this end, we have brought in Japanese novelists Asako Yuzuki, author of Butter, and Kyoko Nakajima, as well as Erika Kobayashi, a popular manga artist. We also have Ukraine’s most famous novelist Andrey Kurkov (author of Death and the Penguin), coming in. We wanted voices from the West to talk about Asia and roped in Dutch historian Herald van der Linde, author of Jakarta: History of a Misunderstood City.“

Anirudh says the team wanted to diversify “the kinds of people who usually showed up to literally festivals,” and so they added a rich dimension of not only novelists from other countries, but also different people from all walks of life. “For instance, we have Sanjay Patel, an Indian-American animator and director at Pixar who is also an Oscar nominee from the United States, musicians Javed Akhtar and Hana Inoue from Japan, sportsperson Anil Kumble and sports lawyer Nandan Kamath among others.”