How literature festivals are shaping public debate in small towns: A festival director weighs in

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Around a week ago, a Reddit user with the handle @Prudent_Hamster5564 posted on a subreddit for Indian books: “We really should be reading more Indian authors. Why don’t we already?” Bookstores are crowded with American and European authors – or Korean in translation – but outside of legendary names like Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth, newer Indian writers are not often visible on shelves.
The publishing industry in India is fairly robust (if insular), so this discovery gap between books and readers is significant. It could be that much of the industry is subject to social media algorithms now, as Sabah Gurmat argued in a recent piece for Vogue: “In the age of social media, writing a book is only the first step.” Some degree of celebrity as cult-of-personality is necessary today even in the world of literature. In a rapidly evolving ecosystem of book reviews, as traditional print recommendations succumb to BookTok and BookTube trends, our choices become shaped by algorithmic popularity. Could literature festivals possibly serve as a bridge?
An article in Scroll asked and answered what the greatest literature festival of all time would look like: Held over the course of four Malgudi days, with conversations between Tagore and Eliot, a roundtable of translators like AK Ramanujan and...
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