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Sharing the dais with writers at the Hay Festival in Thiruvananthapuram, Malayalam superstar Mammootty recently said screenplays deserved to be treated as literary genre and merited serious discussion in literary events. "When literature is discussed, screenplays, too, need to be part of those deliberations," the national award-winning actor said in his address as a guest at the event held in Kerala last weekend.
"People here wait for films for which story and script are done by leading Malayalam writers like M. T. Vasudevan Nair," he said. He said Kerala was a place where people gave due recognition to writers and their works. The scenarists of Malayalam movies also approached their work as creative literature. Former Union minister Shashi Tharoor said Kerala was an ideal place for holding a major literary festival like this since it was a land of rare richness when it came to literature, culture and cinema. Inaugurating the three-day event, state Culture Minister M. A. Baby said the Hay Festival would certainly be a platform for sharing experiences of creative minds hailing from varied social and cultural settings. The festival would especially help young writers to know more about the in-trends in literature in other parts of the world. Director of the Hay Festival Peter Florence said the idea behind it was to mix local authors with authors, artists and filmmakers from around the world. "Well, the idea of the festival is to mix wonderful indigenous local authors with some interesting voices from around the world and we got Basharat Peer, who has won the Crossword prize for Curfew Nights, we had Simon Schama to talk about Obama. We have some of the most phenomenal novelists from around the world," he said. About 50 authors, thinkers and performers from the country and across the world participated. Filmmaker Gopalakrishnan, Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar, writer Vikram Seth, poet K. Sachithanandan, Jaishree Mishra, Namita Gokhale featured in various sessions. Managing Editor of The
Week, Philip Mathew, and several leading writers and academics
from Kerala were also present. —
PTI
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This
was particularly significant in the context of Malayalam cinema which
had been deeply influenced by literature, he said.