So, Who Minds A Bit Of Gore? - Sheila Reddy

Star attraction: American writer Gore Vidal will be in Jaipur

Jaipur Festival's Who's Who

Gore Vidal, Ian McEwan, Fatima Bhutto, Dev Anand, Kamila Shamsie, Aamir Khan, Indra Sinha, Manil Suri, William Dalrymple, Aparna Sen, Gurcharan Das, Donna Tartt, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Nayantara Sahgal, Kunal Basu, Jaishree Misra, Mahesh Dattani, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Namita Devidayal, Uday Prakash, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, Anoushka Shankar, Anita Nair, Sudha Murthy, Moni Mohsin, Miranda Seymour, Ambarish Satwick, Pavan Varma, Arun Maira, Tishani Doshi, Sarnath Banerjee, Ira Pande, David Godwin, Jeet Thayil, Aruna Roy, Shahbano Bilgrami, Christopher Hampton, Himanshu Joshi

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Literary agent Mita Kapur, one of the organisers of the Jaipur Literature Festival, has never felt more like a harassed travel agent.

With less than a week before the curtains go up on India's most popular literary festival, she's busy handling last-minute hotel bookings from publishers, agents and readers across the world. This is one literary party that no one wants to miss—in Jaipur next week from January 20-27.

For a litfest that started with a single writer addressing a dozen readers in a poky little room at the local university four years ago, the Jaipur litfest has come a long way. This year, for example, the litfest has not only managed to raise over Rs 1.35 crore from a variety of sponsors, including banks, breweries, airlines and a construction company, but has also bagged two of the world's best-known literary stars: Gore Vidal and Ian McEwan, besides nearly a hundred writers from the subcontinent, and publishers and agents from India as well as UK, France, Norway and China.

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