19th Jaipur Literature Festival Will Lead The Way For Ideas And Holistic Discourse
One of India’s biggest and mainstream literary fetes, the five-day Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) is returning for its 19th edition from January 15-19, 2026, at Hotel Clarks Amer, Jaipur. Reaffirming its belief in inclusivity and diversity of ideas, JLF 2026 will host voices from across the world, featuring eminent thinkers, writers, artists, policymakers, and cultural leaders. Co-founders and festival directors, William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale, along with Sanjoy K Roy, Festival Producer, JLF and Managing Director, Teamwork Arts have curated a line-up which includes Kiran Desai, D Y Chandrachud, Leo Varadkar, Maharaja Gaj Singh, Javed Akhtar, Richard Flanagan, Richard Horton, Shikhar Dhawan, Stephen Fry, Sudha Murty, Ussama Makdisi, Vir Das, Vishwanathan Anand, William Sieghart, Yoshitoki Ōima, and many others. Apart from enriching dialogues, JLF 2026 will also host the 13th Jaipur BookMark, South Asia’s leading publishing conclave, and Jaipur Music Stage with a line-up of contemporary musicians and genre-blending performances.
Roy shares how JLF has grown to become India’s premier cultural event that attracts the younger generation in search of multifaceted discourses across subjects. He has penned the recently released There is a Ghost in My Room, a book he describes as “an accidental book.” “It is a book about strange happenings in all sorts of incredible places, be it Valladolid, Spain or Edinburgh, UK or up in the mountains in India, or in our homes,” he shares. The supernatural world is also a theme this year at the festival.
(L-R) Kailash Kher, Sanjoy K Roy, Vaishali MathurWhat makes JLF the 'greatest literary show on earth'?
We never set out to create the world's largest or the greatest literary festival. It happened organically and mostly by accident. However, the lucky happenstance was that we were at the right place at the right time. Twenty years ago, literary festivals were not what they are today, most book launches and dispensations. I think what worked is that there was an interest in India then. Jaipur was known as a place of great romance, history, and built heritage etc. The venue itself lent a lot to the festival with a great sense of hospitality, colour and celebration. From day one, JLF became a place that you needed to go to, to share and understand India, but not just India, about the best from across the world. To a large extent, it's been the amazing writers who we've had at the festival and the breadth of conversations that involved everything from math and sciences to technology and philosophy, and from fiction and nonfiction to theatre and poetry that have been key to the success. The idea was to create a 360-degree experience where everybody could come together.
How has JLF evolved in the last 19 years?
We were clear from the first day that what we wanted to create a space for young people that was democratic and accessible. It was going to be first-come, first-served. Today, 67% of our audience is below the age of 27, which is unheard of in most parts of the world in terms of literature. We wanted it to be representative of different kinds of thoughts, political or apolitical. In many ways, it has been the essence of the festival, being able to navigate speakers coming from not just across the Indian spectrum, but across the world. The hope has been to be able to break down the divide between the arts and the sciences and make people understand that both are equally important. It's not either, it's both, because you need the arts and the creativity to think out of the box, and you need the sciences to be able to bring to fruition any innovative thought or action.
What are some of the overarching themes for JLF 2026?
We have the usual: fiction, poetry, history, travel writing. This year, the pop-out themes are going to be conflict, given what the world is going through. There's a lot on the whole economic and trade issues, as well as AI and technology, and innovation, given that next year is going to be the global AI summit in India. Surprisingly, there's a whole series of books on the supernatural. There's been an outpouring of writing on the supernatural in recent times, such as Arundhati Nath's The Phantom’s Howl, Amitav Ghosh's new book, Ghost-Eye, and Namita Gokhale's book, The Whispering Mountains: Greatest Himalayan Folktales. So, all of these books came together to create this accidental theme.
Why is the confluence of mind, ideas and people important for the world?
Across the world today, we're seeing less and less space for different ideas. I think literature festivals, not just ours, across the world collectively work towards creating a platform for all kinds of perspectives and viewpoints. Those festivals that bring varied ideas and voices to the fore and create a space for audiences to come, listen, read and make up their own minds as to which side of the divide they stand on are truly successful. Today, much of the world is in a space where the freedom to express and the freedom of ideas are being challenged. This is what I think writers do very well: take ideas and present them in complex ways. Even Shakespeare’s writing was very political, but he was able to navigate it without the
monarch saying ‘off with his head’. Kabir's philosophy and poetry, 500-600 years later, still resonate because it's so relevant, and it doesn't matter where it's been. The success of any great writing is that it lasts and continues to have relevance; it doesn't matter what age.
Which sessions and conversations are you looking forward to at JLF 2026?
We're going to have Kiran Desai; her book, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, has done really well. Sam Dalrymple's Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia is making waves. There's Marcus Du Sautoy’s new book, Blueprint Blueprints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity, will be amazing. All the sessions on conflict are extraordinary and absolutely vital to our times. There's a whole host of sessions around economics, etc, with the Harvard Business School, Ashoka University, Oxford, and all of our university partners. Physicist and CERN scientist, Dr Archana Sharma, will be sharing insights into the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle in Switzerland. Lots of graphic and manga novelists are coming this year as well, that is a first as well and will be interesting.