Here's what you should look out for at Jaipur Literature Festival 2016

Each year, Namita Gokhale, co-director of the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival (Zee JLF) and an eminent writer, coins a metaphor for the festival she and William Dalrymple started in 2006. In 2011, for instance, she described the four-day festival as literature's 'Woodstock moment'. The following year, she called it 'sahitya ka Kumbh Mela', and the next, a 'bargad ka ped' or banyan tree. And this year, the ninth edition of the festival, has been dubbed 'Kathasaritsagar' or sea of stories.

The appellation, doffing a hat to a classic of ancient Indian literature, is an apt one for the five-day festival which brings together many stories from near and far, by writers and scholars, actors and artists, singers, dancers and creative practitioners of all kinds, both well-known and obscure, from genres popular and serious, emergent and established. In fact, the diversity of the mix Jaipur offers is one of the strengths of the festival, being held this year from January 21-25.

Illustrious line-up
This year, Margaret Atwood, one of the finest living writers today, will travel from Toronto to headline Zee JLF, which will see 220 authors in discussion. Also present will be economist Thomas Piketty, whose 2013 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century did as much, perhaps, as the subprime fiasco to bring about a crisis of confidence in the Western laissez faire market economy.

Among the other bestselling and well-known international authors at Jaipur this year are Alexander McCall Smith, Blake Morrison (author of And When Did You Last See Your Father?), Colm Toibin, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of On Michael Jackson Margo Jefferson – who published her memoir Negroland in September – and graphic artist Molly Crabapple, whose Drawing Blood, with sketches of the Occupy Wall Street protests, Guantánamo Bay, Abu Dhabi's migrant labour camps and Syrian rebels, came out last month.

For Booker-fixated audiences, there'll be this year's winner, Marlon James, plus two more who made it to the long-list – Anuradha Roy and Sundeep Sahota. Also notable is Cyprian Broodbank, whose The Making of the Middle Sea, a history of the Mediterranean Sea from its beginnings more than 22 million years ago to the rise of the Greek and Roman civilisations in the first millennium BC, won this year's Wolfson History Prize.

History is, in many ways, but a form of storytelling – one reason (the other, probably, being that festival director Dalrymple is himself a historian) why historians form a significant part of Zee JLF's programming mix. This year, Oxford historian Peter Frankopan comes back – it's his fourth visit to the Pink City – with Silk Route: A New History of the World, along with Margaret McMillan, also a teacher at Oxford and the writer of a book on women of the Raj. There's also Katherine Butler Schofield, whose work is on music and performance in Mughal times, and Rosie Llewellyn Jones, writer of The Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah (1822-87), a sympathetic account of the last Nawab of Awadh.

Last but not least, there's Stephen Fry, the English comedian and writer still remembered for his portrayal of PG Wodehouse's masterly valet Jeeves from the 1990 television drama Jeeves and Wooster, and photographer Steve McCurry, who's just out with a large format book of his India images.

Hidden gems
Much of the programming, for obvious reasons, centres around authors who are in the news or whose books are upcoming or have come out recently. Book fests like ZEE JLF afford them and their publishers a tailor-made opportunity to reach out to many readers.

Thus there's Karan Johar speaking to journalist Poonam Saxena, who's written his soon-to-be-published biography, Barkha Dutt, speaking on This Unquiet Land, debutant Kanishk Tharoor with Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories, Kunal Basu with his latest novel Kalkatta, and Stephen Alter with The Secret Sanctuary – all published within the last six months.

The good thing about Zee JLF is that along with the usual suspects – the likes of Javed Akhtar, Gulzar, Shobhaa De, Ravinder Singh and Ravi Subramanian, whom you're likely to run into at most fests – is the space it allows for discovery, for regional literature and new writings that have escaped market hoopla, for writings from remote geographies and those on less-talked about issues. This year, for instance, there are two Pakistani writers in exile, Sufi Munawar Laghari and Hasan Mujtaba. Both write in Sindhi, a language that has been struggling for official recognition on both sides of the India-Pakistan border. Then there's Bant Singh, the fiery balladeer of the Dalit resistance in Punjab, respected Assamese litterateur Dhruba Jyoti Baruah, literary activist and eminent Malayali poet K Satchidanandan, Marathi novelist and playwright Makarand Sathe and Essar Batool, a young Kashmiri writer.

Southeast Asia and the subcontinent are well-represented by several speakers from Pakistan, such as Reema Abbasi, Bangladeshi writer Abeer Hoque, Vietnamese poet and author Nguyen Phan Que Mai and Sri Lankan novelist Ashok Ferrey.

Then there are emigre writers from the region that once constituted Yugoslavia, as well a band of writers from Africa: Abdourahman A. Waberi from Djibouti, Sulaiman Addonia (of Eritrean origin) and Kwame Anthony Appiah (originally from Ghana).

Something for everybody
"It should be called the One Week University: if you went to lots of sessions, you would learn more in a few days than in several years at many universities (not Oxford, of course!)," says Peter Fronkopan. Frankopan says he likes the way Jaipur makes him feel like a star. "When I am buried in the library in Oxford or in archives all over the world, I do not feel like a film star. But when I am in Jaipur, I get recognised and asked all sorts of questions – usually very interesting and detailed ones. I love it!"

For Shrabani Basu, who will be at Zee JLF to talk about her latest book on Indian soldiers in World War I, there's something for everybody. "It had all the informality and accessibility of the Hay-on-Wye literature festival in England, but with the special Indian touch (the colours, tea in kullars, the music). That it is free is amazing. All literature festivals in England are ticketed," she says.

Undoubtedly, the Jaipur fest has come a long way from its first year when, as Dalrymple often recounts, there were a handful of speakers and less than 100 listeners – among them a group of Japanese tourists who'd wandered into Diggi Palace by mistake. Last year, Zee JLF had 300 authors and 245,000 walk-ins over four days.

The fest, which spawned the trend of lit fests in India, made its debut in 2015 in the US with the first edition of JLF@Boulder (Colorado), its second international outing after Southbank (UK) in 2014. Jaipur Book Mark, a parallel event held for the past three years and targeted at the publishing industry, is emerging as a platform to meet and explore ways of doing business.

This year, informs Sanjay K Roy, producer of Zee JLF, the festival has instituted a scholarship for translations, so that the wealth of Indian regional writing is accessible to the wider world. "We commissioned eight books across languages last June-July, which should be out by mid-2016. The idea is to make them available to international publishers. It's a small initiative which we hope will grow bigger by the year," he adds.

Much like Zee JLF.

Music
Books are centre stage at Zee JLF, but music isn't far behind. A classical or folk performance usually kick starts proceedings at the Front Lawns, with a high-voltage evening concert closing the day at Hotel Clarks Amer. This year, Rajasthani musicians Nathoo Solanki and Chugge Khan will open the festival. There'll also be Padma Shree Ustad Wasufuddin Dagar, Punjabi folk and jazz singer and sarangi player Amrit Kaur Lohia, Sufi singer Mukhtiyar Ali, guitarist Valentine Shipley, Karsh Kale and bands like Mrigya, Midival Punditz, Swarathma and Skavengers.

Food
As for food, there's a line of pop-up stalls selling sandwiches, quiches and the like on site. But the big hit every time is a table set out on side of the Front Lawns, which serves hot Pushkari chai, spicy Rajasthani kachori and samosas.

Fashion
Fashion at Zee JLF, like the books, is eclectic. It ranges from the Rajasthani poshak, complete with borla, which Diggi Palace's thakurani, Jyotika Kumari Diggi, flits everywhere wearing. One will spot several people in the go-to for 'power-dressing' – saris and ethnic jewellery, while the rest opt for 'smart cosmopolitan': long dresses or skirts and jeans in neutral colours with boots and colourful stoles.