JLF London 2025 at British Library: Sombre, storied, striking

Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) was back at the British Library over the weekend for yet another storied London edition, opening on a sombre note in memory of the lives lost in the Ahmedabad-London Air India flight crash last week.

A planned light-hearted inaugural session on the literary great P.G. Wodehouse with the Indian High Commissioner to the UK, Vikram Doraiswami, was transformed into a demure ‘Power of Words’, during which politician and prolific author Shashi Tharoor and historian Shrabani Basu reflected upon the inadequacy of words when coping with grief of a nature that impacts lives across borders.

Tharoor said: “In many ways, the language of grief, of suffering, loss is a landscape of shadows. It's so often inadequate to the profound desolation that human beings feel and that language attempts, I think inadequately, to articulate.”

Basu, the author of ‘Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan’ and ‘Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant’, said the aim was to fill the room with the power of words “to unite us, to console us, to remember those who lost their lives”.

JLF London once again brought together a kaleidoscope of speakers and writers from around the world to discuss everything from art to literature, history to science, food to film, international politics to sustainability.

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JLF producer Sanjoy Roy, managing director of Teamwork Arts, said: “Creativity is and continues to be at the center of everything that we do.

“This weekend we will be celebrating books and ideas and music and so much more. And this, in many ways, again, is a bridge between India and the UK.”

This year’s programme included sessions with International Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Heart Lamp’ Banu Mushtaq, lyricist and poet Javed Akhtar, novelist Shobhaa De, playwrights Hanif Kureishi and David Hare, JLF co-directors William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale, among others.

*Info: JLF London

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