The DSC Jaipur Literature Festival is an annual literary festival taking place in the Indian city of Jaipur since 2006. Asia's biggest literary festival, it was described by Miranda Seymour in the Mail on Sunday of 10 August 2008 as "the grandest literary Festival of them all".
The Diggi Palace Hotel serves as the main venue of the festival. It is held each year in Jaipur, Rajasthan during the month of January, usually in the Hall of Audience and gardens of the Diggi Palace in the city centre, and celebrates excellence in Rajasthani, Indian and International writing
The festival directors are the writers Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple and is produced by Sanjoy Roy of Teamwork Productions. The Festival is an Initiative of the Jaipur Virasat Foundation founded by Faith Singh, originally as a segment of the Jaipur Heritage International Festival in 2006, and developed into a free-standing festival of literature standing on its own feet in 2008. JVF's Community Director Vinod Joshi is its regional advisor. The Jaipur Heritage International Festival is an initiative of the Jaipur Virasat Foundation. All events at the festival are free and not ticketed.
The festival gained international media attention in 2012, because of a number of events related to Salman Rushdie and the Satanic Verses controversy. In recent years it faces media criticism and lampooning due to its perceived elitism, irrelevance, commercialization of literature and dependence on celebrities.
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“Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration.”
—James Connolly (1870–1916)
“Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme, I have tried; I can find no rhyme to “lady” but “baby”Man innocent rhyme; for “scorn,” “horn”Ma hard rhyme; for “school,” “fool”Ma babbling rhyme; very ominous endings. No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)