The online Ananke Literature Festival brings together writers, publishers and academics from South Asia and beyond, tackling timely subjects in an age of global disruption.

By Olivia Snaije, Contributing Editor

As publishing slows down during the month of August it might be just the time to attend an online literary festival running between August 13-15. The Seventh edition of the Ananke Literature Festival on the theme Fault Lines: An Unmasking brings together writers, publishers, and academics from South Asia and beyond. They will tackle subjects such as borders, migration, inequality, identity, and resilience—timely subjects in this age of global disruption.

The Ananke literature festival evolved out of the Ananke digital media platform, founded by Karachi-born, Dubai-based Sabin Muzaffar in 2014. A journalist and media consultant, Muzaffar wanted to focus on women’s achievements and to provide a digital space where young women could emulate female trailblazers across the Global South. Ananke provides virtual training and mentoring to young women worldwide on subjects such as advocacy, cyber safety, communication journalism, and digital journalism.

The festival is a continuation of Muzaffar’s determination to give a space to marginalized people and issues, to speak truth to power, using using fiction, poetry, translation, publishing, oral history and scholarship.

‘Accessibility’

The idea for the literature festival to be digital had nothing to do with Covid-19, Muzaffar told Publishing Perspectives.

“It was more about giving accessibility to people anywhere.” It also meant that for authors who might not be able to travel easily to each other’s countries—in the case of India and Pakistan for example—the digital realm is a solution, added Muzaffar.

Before launching her festival, Muzaffar said she sought guidance from publishers and media innovators from India and Pakistan, such as Arpita Das of Yoda Press (and Publishing Perspectives columnist), Naveen Kishore of Seagull Books, Urvashi Butalia of Zubaan Books, Mehr F Husain of Zuka Books, Dipankar Mukherjee of Readomania or Aekta Kapoor of eShe magazine.

Many continue to participate in the Ananke festivals. Namrata Sharma, who runs a literary consultancy agency based in Mumbai has been the festival’s director for the past three years.

This year, coinciding with Women in Translation Month, three festival panels are curated by the independent New Delhi-based feminist press Zubaan, and include sessions on feminist literature in translation, writing from the Northeast (India), and Zubaan’s Poster Women archive, a visual mapping of the women’s movement in India. The panel on translation includes author and academic Sabah Mahmood Bashir, author Krupa Ge, and Rita Kothari, co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation at India’s Ashoka University which mentors and trains young translators with material from the numerous Indian languages into other Indian languages, including English.

The festival, traditionally held in April, was moved to August this year and will be pre-recorded as Muzaffar is recovering from an illness. But the August dates could be auspicious, not only because in April some publishers are unavailable, said Muzaffar, but because the festival is “about decolonization and unmasking visible and invisible fractures”—and August 14 is Pakistan’s independence day and the following day is India’s independence day.

One of the books being presented is Qurratulain Hyder’s A Tilt in Time, translated from Urdu to English by Fatima Rizvi. The memoir, which takes place in the 1950s, is a social history of Pakistan and the aftermath of Partition. And the novelist Rahman Abbas, who writes in Urdu and English and explores themes of forbidden politics and love in his work, will speak in a session entitled “Faith, Doubt and Expression: Writing Across Belief Systems.”

‘Our Willingness to Give Literature the Time It Needs to Endure.’

Past festivals have also produced translation collaborations between English and Urdu, added Muzaffar, such as Naveen Kishore’s collection of poems, Knotted Grief, being translated into Urdu. Publishers and authors have also decided to collaborate after meeting each other online with Naima Rashid, for example, becoming a Yoda Press author.

One of the keynote speakers at the festival will be the writer and publisher Sahana Ahmed who founded Bare Bones Publishing in New Delhi. Her talk, “Publishing: People, Process, Technology, and the Grace of Time,” will focus on whether an industry built on patience can survive being made to hurry. Ahmed writes “The greatest fault lines in publishing today are not between tradition and innovation, but between people, process, technology, and our willingness to give literature the time it needs to endure.”

Other festival speakers include writer, translator and activist, Meena Kandasamy, artist, poet and scholar Gautam Vegda, or writer, editor and academic Bhakti Shringarpure, whose biography of Sudanese author Leila Aboulela is forthcoming.

Anam Zakaria will introduce the Canada-based, Qissa  a platform for immigrants where  their oral histories are preserved via inclusive storytelling, while the founders of literary magazines such as The Indus Auguries, dedicated to amplifying regional voices and marginalized narratives from South Asia and beyond, and The Little Journal one of the smallest publishers of Northeast India will discuss their work.

“We’ve scaled in terms of our reach,” said Muzaffar, adding that she loves putting the festival together because “you get to learn so much and engage with thinkers.”

To take a virtual trip to South Asia this August to listen to the 2026 Ananke Literature Festival (and past iterations) panels can be viewed from August 13-15, 2026 here.