The first edition of Shoolini Literature Festival, which would feature an impressive line-up of more than 50 speakers, including Shubha Mudgal, Irshad Kamil, Mahesh Dattani and Githa Hariharan, was inaugurated by the President of the Foundation for Life Sciences and Business Management, Mrs Saroj Khosla.
The festival, which is being held in the virtual space, is being organised by Shoolini University’s Department of English and will be spread over three days and 20 sessions.
The festival began with a prologue by Mukesh Williams on ‘Literature makes the world go round’. This was followed by ‘Meet the author’, featuring Mahesh Dattani and moderated by Malashri Lal.
An interesting discussion on ‘Keeping the Readers Hooked’ by Mona Verma, Vasudev Murthy and Priyadarshini Narendra came next. It was moderated by Siddharth Pandey.
In the afternoon, a session moderated by Nishtha Shukla Anand discussed ‘Of Human Bonding’ with Rakhi Anand, Rohini Pranjpe Sathe, and Bhavna Mishra.
A ‘Meet the Author’ session was held with Sidin Vadukut, moderated by Ashish Khosla. The first day ended with a session on ‘Story Telling in the Classrooms’, moderated by Prof Atul Khosla with Simi Srivastava, Deeptha Vivekanand, Amardip Kaur and Vasudha Neel Mani.
The organisers, Prof Manju Jaidka and Prof Ashoo Khosla, said there was a tremendous response to the first day’s sessions. The programme was live streamed on YouTube and other social media channels.
Among those who would feature in the LitFest tomorrow are, famous poet and lyricist Irshad Kamil and well-known novelist Githa Hariharan.