Indian Summer Festival 2020: 5×15 Global Edition

Ben Okri is a Nigerian poet, novelist, and playwright living in London. His novel, The Famished Road, won the Booker Prize in 1991. His latest novel is Prayer for the Living. He talks about racism as a failure of humanity and the change our world so desperately needs.

Anita Anand is an award-winning journalist, currently hosting the political show Any Answers on BBC Radio 4. She speaks about her book The Patient Assassin, the remarkable story of one man’s globe-spanning twenty-year quest for revenge, for a massacre committed by British troops in Amritsar, Punjab.

Sanjay Kak is an award-winning filmmaker and writer. He speaks about his photobook ‘Witness’ which features the work of nine photographers from Kashmir. Kak describes how photography moves beyond testimony, and becomes a vital contemporary art form in one of the most militarized places in the world.

Marianne Nicholson is an artist activist of the Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nations of the Pacific Northwest Coast. She speaks about her work with pictographs as a way of recording stories of her people on the land.

Aza Raskin is a dark matter physicist and entrepreneur who co-founded Songza and helped found Mozilla Labs. He speaks about his Earth Species Project, an open-source nonprofit dedicated to decoding animal communication using Artificial Intelligence techniques.

Kritika Pandey is an Indian writer and winner of the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Asia. She talks about the hybridity and fluidity of language, the ‘Queen’s Hinglish’ and the connection between Bollywood and Shakespeare.