Galle Literary Festival :

Literati converge in celebrating letters

by Ranga CHANDRARATHNE

Much awaited Galle Literary Festival of 2010 will be held from January 28 to February 1 in an around the historic port city of Galle.

Apart from the host of famed literati from around the world visiting the literary festival which is a premier events on the literary calender, the Galle Literary Festival would offer the visitors the opportunities of discovering the unique cultural life that dates back to the Dutch era in and around the Old Dutch Fortress and in the city of Galle.

Ann Ranasinghe in a session at GLF of 2009

In 2010, the celebrated detective writer Ian Rankin will bring crime writing into the Festival's repertoire while the sensational new graphic novelist Sarnath Banerjee will teach us how to make our own comic books. Novelist Gillian Slovo will speak about growing up in the South Africa of Apartheid, her work bringing the experiences of Guantanamo Bay inmates to the stage and her latest novel, set in Sri Lanka. Poets Wendy Cope and Jackie Kay will give us an afternoon of witty poetry over tea.

Gratiaen winner Shehan Karunatilaka will speak about his novel in manuscript and iconic children's writer Sybil Wettasinghe will recall her own childhood near Galle. Celebrated historian Antony Beevor will speak about the rise of conspiracy theories in history while playwright and novelist Michael Frayn will comments on the role of fiction in shaping history. The Festival is delighted to feature hotly-tipped young South Asian novelists in 2010, among them Mohammed Hanif, Rana Dasgupta and Amit Varma, and of course Sri Lanka's own Michelle de Kretser, Shyam Selvadurai and Ru Freeman. Festival Director Sunila Galappatti says, we are unusually proud of the up coming Galle Literary Festival, for bringing together writers and artists who can speak from their own unusual experiences and perspectives about the very things that interest and concern us today'.

Chamber Music Society of Colombo

One of the special features of this year's festival is performances by Sri Lankan famed artists and composers of music. The Chamber Music Society of Colombo will perform live in concert in the Dutch Reformed Church in Galle, including the world premiere of a new composition by its resident composer Stephen Allen.

The Ravibandu Vidyapati Drum Ensemble and the Chitrasena Dance Company will join the festival with their performance.

For the first time in 2010 the Festival will also run a dedicated day of events for 100 students from Galle schools, so that they may benefit from the international literary festival at their doorstep. This day will be the culmination of an outreach programme that the Festival has run throughout 2009, in both urban and rural schools in Galle and Matara. Aimed at promoting creative reading and writing in Sri Lanka's next generation of writers, this programme has included reading days and writing workshops, run by writers, dramatists and university academics for both students and teachers of 25 schools. The Festival has been supported in this programme by the charity Adopt Sri Lanka which has sustained relationships with these schools.