BHUBANESWAR: Leading poets, writers, translators, thinkers, and theatre and media personalities from across the country are set to converge here for the two-day SOA Literary Festival, which will begin on Saturday.
Themed ‘Culture, Creativity and Artificial Intelligence’, the third edition of the festival will be inaugurated by Governor Hari Babu Kambhampati in the presence of poet, lyricist, scriptwriter and social thinker Javed Akhtar. Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi will grace the festival on Sunday.
The SOA Sahitya Samman, instituted this year, will be presented to Akhtar during the inaugural ceremony for his outstanding and lifelong contribution to Indian cinema and literature. The award carries a cash prize of Rs 7 lakh, a citation, a shawl and a silver idol of Goddess Saraswati. The award will be conferred on a distinguished Indian litterateur every year.
The inaugural ceremony, to be presided over by SOA vice-chancellor Pradipta Kumar Nanda, will be attended by former secretary of Sahitya Akademi K Sreenivasarao, vice president of SOA Saswati Das and head of SOA Centre for Preservation, Propagation and Restoration of Ancient Culture and Heritage of India (PPRACHIN) Gayatribala Panda. The SOA Yuva Sahitya Purashkar, also instituted this year, will be presented to writer Suryasnata Tripathy, for his collection of short stories ‘Thia Puchi Naranga’ on the second day of the festival.
The session ‘Noise, News and Narrative: Whose Truth Do We Trust’ will have editor of The New Indian Express Santwana Bhattacharya as a speaker. Some other sessions include ‘The Future of Publishing: Print, Digital and Beyond’, ‘The Machine as Muse: AI in Art, Music and Literature’, ‘Odia as a Classical Language: Tradition, Identity and Future’, ‘The Future of Story Telling: Tradition and Transformation’ and ‘Mother Tongue or Market Tongue? Writing for Truth or Trend’.