Jaipur Literature Festival 2023 to empower children with Pratham Books Outreach Programme

Jaipur:11/1/22: The 16th edition of the iconic Jaipur Literature Festival is all set to take place from 19^th to 23^rd January 2023, at Hotel Clarks Amer, Jaipur. This year, the Festival has brought back the much-awaited School Outreach programme in collaboration with Pratham Books to ensure a wide variety of children and young people are involved in the ambit of the Festival. Today, Teamwork Arts, the producer of the ‘greatest’ literary show on earth, hosted an exclusive press conference highlighting the significance of the school outreach programme.

This year, the Outreach Programme has reached out to over 50 institutions across Jaipur, impacting 5000+ children. The programme has focused on championing the spread of ideas among the next generation of students through a range of conversations, book readings, storytelling sessions and illustration workshops. Speakers from all around the world namely Edward Chancellor, Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin, Kristin Roskifte, Varud Gupta, Rana Safvi, and Tshering Tashi will interact with the children participating in various workshops, storytelling sessions and book readings. Over the past decade, Pratham Books had engaged with 250+ storytellers and educators who conducted 1000+ reading sessions in 500+ schools impacting 25,000+ children.

With the aim of opening up a wealth of knowledge for children and in turn giving back to the city of Jaipur, the Festival’s annual outreach programme pushes forth its core philosophy of empowering young minds through various sessions across the Festival days and via this robust outreach programme that starts prior to the Festival. This year, the initiative will help readers bridge learning gaps left in students’ academic and emotional growth by online schooling and digital classrooms. With the Library-in-a-Classroom, children will enjoy invaluable physical proximity to printed books, which in turn will encourage them to read and grow emotionally and intellectually.

Sanjoy K. Roy, Managing Director, Teamwork Arts, producer of the Jaipur Literature Festival, said, “The Jaipur Literature Festival has focused on including younger audiences and providing them with a range of the most fascinating ideas and innovations, history and sciences that can be aggregated from across the world.”

Speaking about the collaboration, Himanshu Giri, CEO, Pratham Books, said, “We are delighted to be back at JLF as Outreach Partner, taking the joy of reading to thousands of children. As we continue to strive towards putting ‘a book in every child’s hand’, we are mindful of the learning gaps brought about by school closures during the pandemic. We hope, through this and many other such initiatives, that more children discover the joy of reading through engaging with contextual storybooks in mother tongue languages.”

This season, the Festival pass for all the students will be available at only INR 100/- which is applicable for all Festival days. The literary show will also live-stream some key sessions which will be available on the Festival’s microsite. Audiences watching from across the globe will be able to access these sessions free of charge.