‘Lit fests should be more disruptive, writers should not write books just to get movie adaptations’ | Books and Literature News,The Indian Express

Writers and publishers from India, Germany and Spain discussed the evolving modes of literature and the publishing industry's future

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Among the arenas explored were the changing modes and formats of storytelling over the decades, with Kops saying he observes a “dangerous” trend of writers of books emulating and competing with social media and video platforms. This leads to books that are not as provocative or challenging as they could be. “It becomes about writing books that can be adapted to Netflix films, or thinking only of entertainment, of hitting the numbers… It’s a disturbing tendency that thinks only about the audience.”

Pariat responded that many societies, like Northeast India, have rich oral storytelling traditions that don’t venerate the written book as much. She added that modern interest in audiobooks and podcasts “seems to have brought things full circle.” “Some parts of the world were never interested in reading, and that’s okay… Their ways of understanding the world and consuming stories have come from different resources,” she added.

On translation, Cebrián said that there has long been a fear that the English language will be “the big mouth that eats everything” but the Anglo-American market holds power and enables exchange of ideas. “In Spanish, we earlier used to even translate names — for example, William Shakespeare would become Guillermo Shakespeare! We don’t do that anymore, so translations also reflect how societies evolve,” she said, adding, “We keep certain names [in the translated language] identical to the original language, so the reader has to make the effort of looking it up [for the original effect].”

As the talk shifted to diversity and representation in literary fests, Pariat added a note of caution against writers being typecast into only certain parts of their identities. “Why should queer writers only be on queer panels or Dalit writers only on Dalit ones?” she said, adding, “Lit fests should be more critical, unruly and disruptive.”

https://indianexpress.com/article/books-and-literature/lit-fests-long-night-of-literatures-writers-books-just-indian-and-european-literatures-8171411/


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