By Nihad Amani
Hyderabad: The annual Hyderabad Literary Festival (HLF), will be conducted virtually between January 22 and 24 for the year 2021 owing to the coronavirus pandemic.
This year will see a group of guests from various professions come together. Popular writers like Amitav Ghosh, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Devdutt Pattanaik, Harsh Mander etc will be gracing the event. The festival is quite popular among the locals and hosted special guest like writer Javed Akhtar.
The preparation for the upcoming virtual HLF event has already begun and the three-day event is all about engaging with the authors, talking, debating and interacting.
The event has a set of action-packed programs including stage talks, nanha nukkad for young children, kavya dhaara or storytelling, cultural events and art exhibitions, which will all be virtual this time.
The final list of workshops and stage talks are being chalked out and registrations will be open on the HLF website (hydlitfest.org) soon, said the organisers. However, the schedule is yet to be declared. People who wish to attend the event will have to register for certain programs while some of them are open to all.
Cultural programmes are likely to be a mix of pre-recorded shows, live streams and a hybrid where someone anchors a recorded show.
The four directors of HLF, T. Vijay Kumar, Amita Desai, Kinnera Murthy and Ajay Gandhi believe that they will successfully deliver a jubilant virtual experience to the audience as they have been doing since 2010.