The Kerala Literary Festival (KLF) was on in Kozhikode while I was in Kerala. So we got an overnight bus from Trivandrum and had two days of KLF sessions and an overnight train back to Trivandrum.
The festival is free and all the sessions are in big, open tents on the beach quite close to each other, so it is easy to walk from one to the next.
There were some quite fantastic sessions with some rather fabulous speakers. Many of the sessions were in English. Some were in Malayalam, of course. Sessions were between 30 and 90 minutes. And with several different tents there was a lot of choice.
We saw poets, novelists, essayists, economists, commentators, and journalists. There were people from Kerala, elsewhere in India, Germany, Poland, the UK.
There were discussions about: personal identity; cultural belonging; cultural diversity; queer language; development economics; home; national identity; the role of women; etc.
I particularly enjoyed listening to Abhijeet Banerjee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhijit_Banerjee) talking about the economics of development. And Christopher Kloeble, a German author (whose wife is Indian) talking about what home means to him. And three queer writers talking about queer identity, representation in literature, labels. And a Polish / Indian / German writer (Mithu Sanyal) talking about women and identity and culture.
It was great for the mind and the soul to be able to spend time listening to these amazing speakers, thinking about these really interesting issues and talking to my friends about these and other, related ideas.
Every city should have a free, high quality, annual, literary festival.
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