Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Jaipur Literary Festival returns to Houston with Mira Nair

At the event, Nair will talk about her cinematic language, the vocabulary of the moving image, and her special affinity for literary adaptation.

Jaipur Literary Festival returns to Houston with Mira Nair

The Jaipur Literary Festival, which is hailed as one of the greatest literary shows globally, is set to make a grand return to Houston on September 15, featuring several celebrated writers, analysts and researchers, including award-winning filmmaker Mira Nair.

This marks the sixth edition of the festival, a globally renowned literary extravaganza that will grace Houston from the 15th to the 17th of September.


Having made its debut in Houston back in 2018, the festival has been steadily gaining momentum as a literary force to be reckoned with in North America, following its successful iterations in New York and Colorado.

The festival successfully held in 2022 the first hybrid edition of JLF Houston, following two successful virtual editions in collaboration with the Consulate General of India in Houston, Asia Society Texas Centre, and Inprint.

Producer JLF Teamwork Arts is partnering the event in association with the Asia Society Texas Centre, Inprint, the University of Houston, Rothko Chapel, and Eternal Gandhi Museum Houston.

The festival will open with a session on the long and devastating Ukraine war, titled 'Ukraine: The Cost of War', focused on the realities of conflict reporting and how literature is impacted by the nature of war.

At another session, filmmaker Mira Nair, known for her films like The Namesake, Monsoon Wedding, and Salaam Bombay, will talk about her cinematic language, the vocabulary of the moving image, and her special affinity for literary adaptation.

Stay tuned to this space for more updates!

More For You

Samir Zaidi

Two Sinners marks Samir Zaidi’s striking directorial debut

Samir Zaidi, director of 'Two Sinners', emerges as a powerful new voice in Indian film

Indian cinema has a long tradition of discovering new storytellers in unexpected places, and one recent voice that has attracted quiet, steady attention is Samir Zaidi. His debut short film Two Sinners has been travelling across international festivals, earning strong praise for its emotional depth and moral complexity. But what makes Zaidi’s trajectory especially compelling is how organically it has unfolded — grounded not in film school training, but in lived observation, patient apprenticeships and a deep belief in the poetry of everyday life.

Zaidi’s relationship with creativity began well before he ever stepped onto a set. “As a child, I was fascinated by small, fleeting things — the way people spoke, the silences between arguments, the patterns of light on the walls,” he reflects. He didn’t yet have the vocabulary for what he was absorbing, but the instinct was already in place. At 13, he turned to poetry, sensing that the act of shaping emotions into words offered a kind of clarity he couldn’t find elsewhere. “I realised creativity wasn’t something external I had to chase; it was a way of processing the world,” he says. “Whether it was writing or filmmaking, it came from the same impulse: to make sense of what I didn’t fully understand.”

Keep ReadingShow less