A lit fest with sessions to read, write and learn about your city

The Times LitFest, Kolkata, will be initiating many firsts to the city, one of them being workshops in a fest. A series of workshops will be organized on the sidelines of the festival to keep children and young adults occupied as elders can take time off to listen to the high-wattage English and Bengali literary sessions that will happen simultaneously.

The fest, which has been enthralling Delhi for a few years, will debut in Kolkata this year on Sunday, November 25, at the grand colonial setting of the

Tollygunge Club

.

There will be five workshops in a special venue at the club adjacent to the areas where the literary sessions have been planned. All the workshops will be conducted by celebrated authors.

The workshops will happen post noon till 6pm. However, registrations for the event will have to be done by 10:30am. The first workshop, ‘Write India: Art of Short Story Writing’, will be conducted by author Dipankar Mukherjee.

The TOI offices are flooded with inquiries about this workshop from budding authors, who wish to take up writing as a career. Take the case of Class-IX student, Soumyojit Basu of B D Memorial International School. Basu would like to attend just because he wants to know how a story is born. The session by Mukherjee will be an hour long eventand the seats are limited. So, it would be wise to register early.

New York Times bestselling author,

Clare Mackintosh

, who is loved across the world for her thrillers, has agreed to conduct a workshop on how to write a successful thriller.

Sukanya Das, an avid thriller reader and a mother of two children feels this is a session to die for. “Though many consider thrillers to be pulp fiction, I think it is a genre that needs a lot of research. Look at how Dan Brown took the world by storm. I will definitely register,” she said.

The head of the classics division at Penguin, UK, Henry Eliot, will talk on 10 classics that all Indians should read. Eliot is rare to get and there have been inquiries galore about his session.

Just as difficult to get is the duo, Allan and Barbara Pease, the two motivational writers who have the answers to all your questions on how to live a successful life. They will talk on, “How to get what you want from life,” and one hopes they will as usual have answers to all your questions on stress, how to handle it and move forward.

Purono Kolkatar Golpo, is a Facebook group, that has been popularizing places and lost stories about your favourite city. This group has agreed to hold a workshop christened ‘photographing old Kolkata’. The session by Purono Kolkatar Golpo will be the the last workshop of the day and is scheduled to take place between 5 PM and 6 PM.