LAHORE: The ninth iteration of the Lahore Literary Festival (LLF), which will be a virtual event because of the coronavirus pandemic, is scheduled to be held from Feb 19 to 21.

Through its social media pages and YouTube, the LLF will broadcast its sessions from afternoon to evening on all the three days of the event, a press release said on Wednesday.

The list of the participants in this year`s LLF includes the 2002 Man Booker Prize winner, Yann Martel; the Canadian author of the internationalbestseller `Life of Pi`, Jhumpa Lahiri; the 2000 Pulitzer win-ner for the short-story collection `Interpreter of Maladies` an eminent American scholar of South Asia, Wendy Doniger; the noted Urdu critic and playwright Shamim Hanfi, Libyan émigré writer and artist Hisham Matar, who is the author of `In the Country of Men`, CNN host and bestselling author Fareed Zakaria, the 2020 International Booker Prize winners Marieke Lucas Rijneveld and Michele Hutchison and new Pakistani English fiction writers Osman Haneef and Saba Karim.

`The LLF has prominently placed Lahore as part of the global literary cities and annually inspires new writers and artists with an opportunity to hear and ask questions from Nobel laureates, Booker Prize and Pulitzer Prize winners, stated Razi Ahmed, who is curating the festival for the ninth consecutive year.

`In the distressful times we have witnessed during the past year due to the lockdowns and proliferation of the coronavirus across the world, a platform like the LLF seeks to heal, inspire and help us imagine a collective community to aspire to common values and humanism,` he said.

LLF, a registered not-forprofit festival, has always been a free and open-for-the-public event.

`Its online sessions, as part of the virtual festival, will be accessible to all without anyneed for registration,` LLF Director Nusrat Jamil said.

`We will strive towards making the festival as close as possible, with all its limitations, to a real and experiential event, Mrs Jamil elaborated.

`For instance, by providing links online for book sales to substitute for the booksellers on-site as is the annual tradition.

LLF`s previous iterations in Lahore, London and New York have hosted the leading writers and thinkers of our times, including Orhan Pamuk, Malala Yusafzai, Romila Thapar, Elif Shafak, Tariq Ali, Rabih Alameddine, Mohsin Hamid, Abdullah Hussein, Asif Farrukhi, Intizar Hussain, Bapsi Sidhwa, Sharmila Tagore, Fatima Bhutto, Mira Nair, Peter Frankopan, Margaret MacMillan, Kamila Shamsie, Teju Cole, Sinan Antoon, Riz Ahmed, and more.