The ninth edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival opened on Thursday on a cool winter morning to the predictable jam-packed venues, thronging with people who ferociously attended talks, readings and book launches on poetry, cooking, politics, business, history, journalism, and fiction. There is now a certain comfort in the grandness of it all. Here are our picks from the first day:

Margaret Atwood’s keynote speech

The 76-year-old Canadian author was in top form during her keynote address. “To be invited to give the keynote [at the Jaipur Literature Festival], I must either be very important or very old. I suspect it is the latter,” she began.

In a warm, engaging speech, she traced the origins of literature festivals and her own beginnings as a twenty-year-old poet reading to audiences. She noted how some of the first builders of literature festivals were not imperial centres, but ex-colonies such as Australia, Canada, and India.

Atwood spoke about the nature of human beings as “narrative creatures”, emphasising that “authors descend from village storytellers.” Such is the power of stories that you can “lose your life” if you possess “a dangerous or unacceptable story”.

At the heart of Atwood’s speech was the reason that literature festivals are so successful: the relationship between reader and writer, “for writers and readers are joined at the hip”.

After all, she pointed out, “we become writers because we love to read”, and the writer’s “other half” is the reader.

"Writing is the means whereby light is shed on darkness. There are many darknesses but also many voices."

— Margaret Atwood

Ruskin Bond talking about his (almost) first kiss

One of the day’s first sessions was a conversation between 81-year-old author Ruskin Bond and publisher Ravi Singh. Singh gently facilitated an exchange about the most personal things that have shaped Bond’s writing: the time that he ran away from school, why he still gets upset when he witnesses couples quarreling in the presence of their children, and whether his father was his first friend.

Bond spoke as simply and directly as he writes, and delighted the audience with his attempts to dodge the more personal of Singh’s questions. When asked about his love life, he declared, “I am feeling very shy now.” He was persuaded into talking about his first kiss, though, which was attempted at the age of eleven. “The first time I tried to kiss a girl and she tried to kiss me, we missed each other.”

Bond spoke candidly about his loneliness in the UK, and his decision to come back to India. When asked about his choice of living in the hills, he said, “Place is important, but it is not the place that makes the writer. I was a writer long before I moved to the hills.”

"Don’t run away from school – make your teachers run away from the school.”

— Ruskin Bond

The Man Booker Bookshelf: Anuradha Roy, Sunjeev Sahota, and Marlon James

The novelist Anjum Hasan helmed a thoughtful discussion on the three very different novels written by Roy, Sahota, and James, one longlisted (Roy’s), one shortlisted (Sahota’s) and one winner (James’s). As it happens, the authors spoke on a range of subjects wider than these specific books, which was particularly interesting because Hasan asked them to share thoughts about their writing process, approaches to plot and character, and the themes and subjects that absorb them the most.

Sahota talked about how the concept of “apne” (“one’s own”) widens with the experience of immigration, so that it can become extended to all fellow brown people in the UK, for instance. James spoke about little known aspects of Bob Marley’s life that he explored in his novel, pointing out that many people didn’t know about the assassination attempt on the singer.

Roy explained how the larger themes of her novels emerge only after she’s finished writing them, and that for her it is important to drive stories through the emotional linkages between characters.

What about craft? James expressed his ambivalence about beautiful writing that talks about ugly things, such as violence and discrimination, asking whether it wasn’t better to write “ugly” about such things instead. He also shared his frustration with the simplistic portrayal of Jamaica in travel writing, saying, “There is an insistence by writers, particularly by travel writers, that they can find one single story, write that one single sentence that captures Jamaica.”

"He (Donald Trump) is cartoonish but we have to take him seriously."

— Marlon James