Jaipur Literature Festival 2020

William Dalrymple is a bestselling author of In Xanadu, City of Djinns, From the Holy Mountain, White Mughals, The Last Mughal, Nine Lives, and most recently, Return of a King: An Indian Army in Afghanistan. He has won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the French Prix d’Astrolabe, the Wolfson Prize for History, the Scottish Book of the Year Award, the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Asia House Award for Asian Literature, the Vodafone/Crossword Award for nonfiction, and has, prior to the shortlisting of Return of a King, been longlisted three times for the Samuel Johnson Prize. The Italian edition of Return of a King won the 2015 Hemingway Prize and the prestigious Kapuściński Prize for Literary Reportage. In September 2016, a Hindustani translation of The Last Mughal was released as Aakhri Mughal, and in December Juggernaut published his new book, Kohinoor, co-written with Anita Anand. Dalrymple is one of the founders and a co-director of the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival.

Makarand Sathe, an architect by profession, has been writing plays, novels, articles, and film scripts in Marathi for the last two decades. His works have been performed at national and international festivals and won prestigious awards, including the Deenanath Mangeshkar award, the prestigious Natyadarpan award, Maharashtra Foundation award, and Kalagaurav award, among many others. He has written several novels in Marathi, of which The Man Who Tried to Remember was translated into English by Shanta Gokhale. He is also the author of A Socio-Political History of Marathi Theatre: Thirty Nights in three volumes.

Kavita Puri is a British journalist, radio broadcaster, and author. Her 2019 book, Partition Voices: Untold British Stories, is based on her award-winning BBC Radio 4 documentary series of the same name. Puri studied law at St Catharine's College at the University of Cambridge, graduating in 1995. Puri has worked on BBC Newsnight as a political producer, film producer and assistant editor, and as the editor of Our World, a foreign affairs documentary programme. Her 2014 BBC Radio 4 series, Three Pounds in My Pocket, told the stories of South Asians who migrated to post-war Britain. In 2015, Puri was named Journalist of the Year by the Asian Media Awards. In Partition Voices, a three-part series produced for BBC Radio 4 in 2017, Puri documented the stories of Colonial British and British Asians who lived through the 1947 Partition of India. Partition Voices won the Royal Historical Society's Radio and Podcast Award and its overall Public History Prize. In 2019, she published a book, Partition Voices: Untold British Stories, based on the series. In Literary Review, John Keay described the book as "the closest thing to a partition memorial currently on offer," and a "heartfelt and beautifully judged book". In 2018, then-Prime Minister Theresa May appointed Puri as a trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum for a period of four years.