Jaipur Literature Festival returns to Boulder

The Jaipur Literature Festival, the world’s largest free literary festival, returns to Boulder in September for its second year.

JLF is an annual literary festival that takes place in the Indian city of Jaipur and also on the Southbank in London. Sanjoy Roy, the festival producer says the Jaipur Literature Festival has grown over the last 9 years into what is seen as the world’s largest literary gathering “with over 330,000 people coming through our doors over a period of 5 days every January in Jaipur.”

Roy says Boulder is known for its highly educated, professional population and for its deep interest and leadership in social, technical and environmental innovation and for fitness and natural health and healing, thus making it a perfect location for the JLF. He says that the JLF at Boulder is unique to this location.

“For JLF at Boulder it’s really a whole new program where we look at local content, that forms about 30% of our program, issues that are specific to Boulder and Colorado and to this part of the United States. We look at the national programing in the larger sense of the Americas, across both the Americas, and then of course international programing. But in all of this what we try and do is we look at the issues that worry people here, that are of concern for people here and then look at juxtaposing that against a national mindset and of course an international mindset. You have a range of buy ins from authors who have written from all points of view, so audiences are able to engage with it not just from a local perspective but really from a national and international perspective.”

This years participants include 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar, Colorado author Laird Hunt and the Royal Queen Mother of Bhutan.