Jan. 15: If mammoth crowds of book lovers is the USP of the Calcutta book fair, brace yourself, the crowds are only going to get bigger!

In its 41st year, the International Kolkata Book Fair will host two of the biggest crowdpullers in the Indian book business - Chetan Bhagat and Durjoy Datta.

 

The book fair will be held at Milan Mela - near Science City - from January 25 to February 5. Within the book fair, there will be a three-day Kolkata Literature Festival (KLF) 2017, held in association with The Telegraph.

From February 2 to 4, the fourth edition of KLF will be packed with an eclectic mix of sessions - from the art and craft of translations to Indian writing in English, from poetry to popular literature, from children's writing to cinema, and much more.

On Republic Day, Shatrughan Sinha is expected at a special curtain-raiser of the festival, speaking about his life and his memoir, Anything But Khamosh.

"There are three literature festivals in Calcutta in the span of one month, which is good for lovers of books and literature. Kolkata Literature Festival will be special because it will be held within the book fair, which provides access to a few million people to books and writing," said Sujata Sen, the director of KLF.

This year the festival will host speakers from eight other countries, including Costa Rica, which is the focal theme country at the 41st Book Fair.

Lovers of crime fiction can look forward to a session titled 'Bloody Scotland in Kolkata' with Scottish crime writers Lin Anderson and Doug Johnstone, and Jenny Brown, who has chaired the famous Bloody Scotland crime writing festival in Stirling.

There will also be a delegation from Wales, comprising poet-writers Natalie Ann Holborow, Sion Tomos Owen and Sophie McKeand. They will tour Calcutta, the Sunderbans and Santiniketan and some other Indian cities and capture their experiences in verse or prose. In May, a delegation of Bengali writers will visit Wales for a similar exercise. Their combined writings will be published in a book titled 'The Valley, The City and The Village.'

Other foreign writers one will get to hear include Khaled Al Khamissi of Egypt and poets Neel Hall and Nishi Chawla from Iowa, the US.

Among popular fiction writers, apart from Chetan Bhagat and Durjoy Datta, there will be Sudeep Nagarkar, a prolific romance writer from Mumbai steadily climbing the bestselling charts.

A session with Laxmi Narayan Tripathi is also on the cards. The transgender activist, who has been seen on television reality shows like Bigg Boss and Sacch Ka Saamna, will speak about her book, Red Lipstick: The Men in My Life, and dwell on whether LGBT literature helps in making society more tolerant of gender minorities, along with Manabi Bandopadhyay, India's first transgender college principal.

Bollywood actress Divya Dutta will launch the book she has written on the life of her mother, Nalini.

This year the Jit Paul Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Jawhar Sircar, the former culture secretary of the central government, in conversation with Devi Kar, the director of Modern High School for Girls. Titled 'Killing me softly', the session will discuss the access or lack of access to education for millions of children.

Almost all the sessions will be held at the book fair pavilion. "The pavilion is being recreated to make it a more intimate space for conversations," said festival director Sen.

Readers can also look forward to special contests run by The Telegraph on social media, the winners of which will get to meet some of their favourite writers up close at The Telegraph Authors' Lounge on the festival premises.

For more details and the festival schedule, visit www.kolkatabookfair.net