Jaipur Literature Festival 2026: Where Litterateurs Unite
With a remarkable scale of over 300 sessions and more than 500 speakers from 25+ countries, this year’s edition too was a resounding success
It’s that time of the year again when the pink city of Jaipur becomes synonymous with the grand celebrations of books and reading. The Jaipur Literature Festival 2026 kicked off in all its glory this week as the winter sun shone brightly upon readers, writers, publishers and literature enthusiasts.
Kannada writer, activist, lawyer and Booker Prize winner Banu Mushtaq’s strong keynote address to a packed audience set the tune for the literary show. In her speech, she reinstated the importance of challenging patriarchy and communalism drawing from her own experiences at the Mysuru Dasara festival in October 2025.
Poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar’s familiar face and entertaining wit was a welcome break as he spoke about the how language can never belong to a religion at his India in Urdu: Urdu in India session. Adding gravitas to languages was Deepa Bhasthi, also the Booker winning translator of Heart Lamp, who spoke about translating the silence between words. Another audience favourite was Shobhaa De whose new book The Sensual Self is just out and is one that echoes the conversant sentiments of desire, intimacy and quiet awakenings.
A session on travel literature has been an important part of the festival since many years, and this year, leading the way were Monisha Rajesh, Pallavi Aiyar, Geoff Dyer and Noa Avishag Schnall who emphasized thrilling narratives signifying personal journeys that act as frames for histories of places and people.
The highlight, however, this year was Kiran Desai who’d returned to the festival after 15 long years to celebrate the launch of her latest novel, two decades in the making, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Speaking about the labour of writing she talked about how writing for her is like daily work, and how in the writing of this book, her grandparents’ veranda in Allahabad came to be extremely important in her creative life.
Endless queues formed for book signing after actor and author Stephen Fry’s session on The Odyssey where he passionately discussed how epics omit gods from film adaptations and how reading fantasy helps you conjure worlds that are not real. He also recalled his experience of playing the many facets of Oscar Wilde and how he prepared for the wit and vulnerability demanded by the role.
A fair share of celebrity books also made it to the festival: Vir Das’s memoir The Outsider, Shalini Passey’s The Art of Being Fabulous, and social media influencers Ria Chopra’s Never Logged Out: How the Internet Created India’s GenZ, and Anurag Minus Varma’s The Great Indian Brain Rot, among others.
Among the first edition launches was former Minister of Education Dr Karan Singh’s biography, Safeena Husain’s debut book Every Last Girl, the extraordinary story of Educate Girls, the award-winning organisation that has reshaped access to education for out-of-school girls in rural India, and Neha Sinha’s Wild Capital, an extraordinary book about wilderness of the bustling metropolis of Delhi, among others.
With a remarkable scale of over 300 sessions and more than 500 speakers from 25+ countries, this year’s edition too was a resounding success celebrating a mélange of writers, readers, publishers, and art and culture enthusiasts.