Past speakers have ranged from Nobel Laureates J. M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Malala Yousafzai, Muhammad Yunus, and Joseph Stiglitz; Man Booker Prize winners Ben Okri, Douglas Stuart,Margaret Atwood and Paul Beatty; Sahitya Akademi winners Gulzar, Javed Akhtar, M. T.Vasudevan Nair, as well as the late Girish Karnad, Mahasweta Devi and U. R. Ananthamurthy; along with literary superstars such as Amish Tripathi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Vikram Seth. An annual event that goes beyond literature, the Festival has also hosted Amartya Sen, Amitabh Bachchan, the late A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, Bill Gates, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Oprah Winfrey, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Stephen Fry, Thomas Piketty, and former president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai.The past decade has seen it transform into a global literary phenomenon, having hosted over 2,000 speakers and welcoming over a million book lovers from across India and the globe.“We will have both a physical and digital festival, we will have five-plus venues on the ground. So, during the five-day physical event, we will have unique sessions on the ground, some of which we will also broadcast online in real-time. After the physical events, we will have a series of unique digital sessions. So, not everything you see physically will be broadcast live, and not everything you can watch digitally will be a physical event on the ground. We are trying to create a unique opportunity for both sets of audiences” said Sanjoy Roy, Director of the Festival.The festival attracted as many as 25,000 visitors on a single day, making it the world’s biggest festival. But that was when there were no charges on registration. This time, entry at the new venue would be by tickets and it remains to be seen if the festival attracts paying customers or not.“The audiences for the physical events will certainly be smaller, since Covid protocols won’t allow us to have as many people as we used to. The effort for the physical events will be to get as many speakers in as possible. When we used to have only on-ground events, we used to pack the panels, with the result that sometimes participants had very little time to speak. The digital format does not allow for so many panelists – it works best with one-on-one or maybe two with one conversation. Where necessary and possible, we will beam in participants from other countries who do not – or cannot – travel and add them to on-ground panels. The effort for the physical events will be to get as many speakers in as possible.” said Roy.
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