The eighth Karachi Literature Festival (KLF) will be held from February 10 to 12 at a local hotel, announced the founder of the festival and Oxford University Press Managing Director Ameena Saiyid in a press conference at the Arts Council of Pakistan here on Tuesday.
Ameena Saiyid said through the festival, the KLF will bring together and celebrate Pakistani and international authors writing in diverse languages. Saiyid said this year book lovers would be able to see and hear 100 Pakistani and 30 international speakers from 10 countries participating in various sessions of the festival.
She said there would be poetry reading sessions in English and Urdu, talks, panel discussions, music and dance performances during the three-day event. She said Germany was sponsoring the best book of the year that promoted peace, tolerance and international understanding.
Saiyid then spoke about the different prizes to be given during the festival. The first one was the KLF-Pepsi Non-fiction Prize for the best book written in English in 2015-16 by a Pakistani. She said that Mustansar Hussain Tarar and Aysha Jalal will be the keynote speakers at the inauguration and the closing ceremony will be addressed by Bobby Sager and Muhammad Hanif.
She said Adeel Hashmi, Afzal Ahmed Syed, Ali Akbar Natiq, Amar Jaleel, Ahmed Rashid, Arfa Sayeda Zehra, Arif Hasan, Asif Noorani, Arshad Mahmud, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, Attiya Dawood, Ayesha Tammy Haq, Bina Shah, Chaudhry Aitzaz Ahsan, Christina Oesterheld, Fahmida Riaz, H.M Naqvi, Hamid Khan, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Sania Saeed, Shabnam, Tina Sani, Nadeem F. Paracha and Nafeesa Shah are among the many literary luminaries, academics, and intellectuals who will participate in the event.
She said an event like the KLF, the eighth in this city, was like a beacon whose light spreads out far beyond the grounds of the venue, indeed, far beyond this city itself.
She further said the festival had grown rapidly as attendance soared from roughly 5,000 in 2010 to 125,000 in 2015. She said the KLF was not merely a local affair, adding that with participants and visitors from all over the country, from all four provinces and all of our major cities, this is truly an all-Pakistan event.
Speaking on the occasion, the co-founder of the festival Dr Asif Farrukhi said the purpose of the KLF was to promote books and showcase Pakistani writers. He said since it’s going to be the 70th year of Pakistan’s inception, the festival would entail discussion that would look objectively at the achievements and experiences of Pakistan in the last seven decades.
