Hyderabad Literary Festival 2022 to open online on January 28

The line-up of delegates includes Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee, vocalist T M Krishna and master lensman Raghu Rai

For the second consecutive year, the Hyderabad Literary Festival (HLF) 2022 will be held virtually. This year’s edition will unfold online (at youtube.com/c/hlf-india) from January 28 to 30. When the directors of the festival decided late last year to conduct HLF 2022 virtually, it appeared to be a preemptive move, factoring in the possibility of the third wave of COVID-19: “It was a good call to plan an online festival,” reckons Amita Desai of Goethe-Zentrum Hyderabad, one of the festival directors.

HLF began in 2010 and in its physical form, hosted multidisciplinary events — literary sessions, poetry, storytelling, workshops, performing arts, theatre, art showcases, workshops and movie screenings. HLF 2022 will incorporate events in all these streams online.

This year’s festival is dedicated to the late Ajay Gandhi, founder of Manthan and one of the former directors of HLF. Carnatic vocalist and writer T M Krishna will deliver a tribute to Mr Gandhi on the opening evening, before moving on to talk about ‘Artistic Universe: Creative Spaces Within and Without’.