Report: Kerala Literature Festival 2025
Featuring Nobel Laureates Esther Duflo and Venki Ramakrishnan alongside Booker Prize winners like Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hofmann, Paul Lynch, and Georgi Gospodoniv, the Kerala Literature Festival 2025 clearly pulled out all the stops
People who fear that reading is on the decline, especially among the youth, would have been pleasantly shocked at the eighth edition of the Kerala Literature Festival (KLF) from January 23 to 26. Hordes filled every venue set up on Kozhikode beach over those four days. Readers showed up to hear authors, ask questions, buy books and take selfies with their literary idols. The sea was not just a backdrop. Its glorious presence, vast and endless, made KLF stand out.
The festival, which calls itself “a global celebration of words, cultures and ideas” featured Nobel Laureates Esther Duflo and Venki Ramakrishnan alongside Booker Prize winners such as Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hofmann, Sophie Mackintosh, Paul Lynch, and Georgi Gospodoniv. Clearly, the organizers pulled out all stops to accomplish their goal of bringing in at least six lakh attendees.
What made an impression, apart from the scale, was that the authors looked genuinely happy to interact with their readers. “A literature festival should throw its arms open to everyone, not limit itself to the elite. With Kozhikode getting the UNESCO City of Literature tag, it is even more important to undertake initiatives for an inclusive reading culture,” said Ravi Deecee, founder and chief facilitator of KLF.
The speaker line-up included other big names such as diplomat Shiv Shankar Menon, filmmaker Mani Ratnam, politicians Thamizhachi Thangapandian and Brinda Karat, flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia, actors Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah, cricketer Syed Kirmani, and singer Mir Mukhtiyar Ali. There were discussions on children’s literature, identity politics, global warming, queer literature, maritime history, artificial intelligence, feminist writing, foreign policy, and the global financial crisis.
Shobha Viswanath, co-founder of Karadi Tales, opened up about how children’s literature in India has evolved from a narrow focus on “mythology, folklore and stories of freedom fighters” to a diverse space with room for stories “about a boy who wants to wear bangles and a girl who wants to be a mahout”. She spoke about collaborating with the People’s Archive of Rural India to create children’s books based on journalistic reports. “Urban children really need to know how privileged and entitled their lives sometimes are,” she said, adding that these books are being used as supplementary readers in schools.
French illustrator Cheyenne Olivier, who collaborated with Esther Duflo on Poor Economics for Kids, shared insights into her work. She explained that she did not want to use black and white because that would reinforce the lens of pity that poor people are often subjected to. Every page has a burst of colour, reflecting not just the hardships in their lives but also the social connections that they enjoy, and the creative solutions that they come up with. “Children read images, not only the text. Details are important. If there’s a mismatch between how a character looks on two different pages, they spot it.”
Prayaag Akbar, author, Mother India, confessed that he was sick of writing about rich people and that made him gravitate towards Delhi’s urban villages — especially Mahipalpur — for his novel’s source material. “I used to pass through this area as a kid in my car, and would occasionally stop to buy chips on the way home from school. Now backpackers’ hostels and massage parlours have opened up, making it a seedy place,” he said. Journalist Anita Pratap, best known for interviewing Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam chief V Prabhakaran, who was moderating the session, got him to speak about his experiences as a Muslim man living in India. “We cannot pretend that India was an egalitarian society before the Bharatiya Janata Party formed the government,” he said, adding that Hindu nationalism is following the script of Islamic nationalism in Pakistan and Iran “that went through radicalization and targeting of minorities much earlier”.
Santanu Bhattacharya, author, Deviants: The Queer Family Chronicles, pointed out that religious minorities, women and queer people want to leave the country “to make better lives” for themselves elsewhere. This, however, is possible only for those with the means to leave. Bhattacharya admitted that he, unlike many other queer people, was lucky to find acceptance and love at home. His communist father said, “Oscar Wilde was gay, Tchaikovsky was gay, now my son is gay. How does it matter? Go live your life.” His mother had a more challenging time. “She is not a rebel in her own life but she has been a source of support to me,” Bhattacharya said.
KLF also gave a platform to voices of resistance engaged in building alternatives to create a better world. The festival did not shy away from confronting the issue of sexual harassment in the Malayalam film industry, which has been making headlines thanks to the findings of the Hema Committee report. Anjali Menon, Parvathy Thiruvothu and Miriam Joseph from the Women in Cinema Collective talked about the need for women to have safe and non-discriminatory workplaces to combat the structural violence they face.
Author and library activist Mridula Koshy emphasized the importance of setting up and supporting free anti-caste libraries all over India. “We haven’t yet figured out how to address the inequalities in our society that persist due to lack of access to information,” she said. Writer and translator Meena Kandasamy spoke about the vibrant culture of reading nurtured by the Dravidian and Marxist movements through padipagams, which are not just spaces for reading but forums for equality and liberation.
Lawyer and science fiction author Gautam Bhatia, whose latest book is called The Indian Constitution: Conversations with Power, said, “The flexibility of the Indian Constitution has made it possible for the political elite to amend it.” He pointed out that this strength is also a weakness. Since the Constitution allows for a range of interpretations, it is also prone to manipulation.
Podcaster Ashdin Doctor, author, Change Your Habits, Change Your Life, spoke about “the constant battle between the desire for change and the fear of change” that keeps many of us stuck in our habits. “Many people don’t like self-help books because nothing changes in their life after reading. What’s needed, however, is implementation. Reading alone cannot help you fix things.”
JCB Prize-winning translator Shahnaz Habib spoke about translation as akin to “playing in the mud, and getting your hands dirty”. She said that translators, unlike writers, don’t have to start from scratch. They already have a text to work with, which allows them to play and experiment.
The audience also got a chance to meet literary talents like Johanna Gustawsson, Philippe Claudel, Zeina Abirached and Chowra Makaremi from France, this year’s guest nation at the festival. In addition to this, KLF had storytelling sessions, performances, a publishers’ conference, and Kaivalya Plays’ multimedia “headphone theatre” exhibit called I, JOSEF, based on Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial and presented in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Delhi. Gaurav Singh Nijjer, who directed and designed it, said that “the idea was to give audiences a feel of what it must be like to get inside Josef’s confused and chaotic mind”.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say the Kerala Literature Festival 2025 was worthy of a standing ovation.
Chintan Girish Modi is a Mumbai-based journalist who writes about books, art and culture. He can be reached @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.