India lost the World Test Championship final to Australia in London last June. For Kolkata, the match resulted in a tryst with a Nobel laureate.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, a Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic and the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature was the guest of honour at the 12th edition of the Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet, in association with the Victoria Memorial Hall and The Telegraph, which began on Tuesday.
“We met during a Test match which India lost. But meeting you made me a bit of a winner that day,” festival director Malavika Banerjee said at the opening.
“It is a festival of the whole city. Its reputation as a place which loves books enables us to bring the finest authors, finest thinkers and the finest artistes of our times to this city,” she said.
Banerjee was talking of the finals of the World Test Championship at the London Oval, where she invited Gurnah to the festival in Kolkata.
“It was a rather tragic event in the end because India lost. But it was a happy occasion in other ways. There were so many former Indian Test players in the box whom I was meeting for the first time. Malavika then invited me to come and join you,” said Gurnah, the first Nobel laureate for literature to be part of this festival.
“Whenever I told people that I am going to Kolkata they said it is a beautiful place. Nobody says it is overcrowded and full of traffic. Not anything like that. It is a beautiful city is what I keep hearing. So, it must be true,” he said.
Gurnah is in the city at a time India and England are getting ready to take on each other in a Test match. This time, in India.
Governor C.V. Ananda Bose, who inaugurated the festival, said: “As a student of literature, it has been my dream to share a stage with a Nobel laureate for literature. That dream has come true today.”
Samarendra Kumar, secretary and curator of the Victoria Memorial, and Sarvesh Kumar, chief of corporate communications at Tata Steel, were among those present at the inauguration.
Besides Gurnah, Damon Galgut, the 2021 Booker Prize winner, Sudha Murthy, John Boyne, Sebastian Faulks and Amitav Ghosh are among the speakers at the literary
bonanza, which ends on January 27.