Dhaka Lit Fest

Bangla enjoys the reputation of a rich literary heritage, and one that was once very outward looking. All the greats of modern Bengali writing—Madhusudan Dutta to Rabindranath Tagore, modernist poets of both West and East Bengal—were avid readers of Western and Oriental literature. To celebrate that spirit of a cosmopolitan modernism is the mission of the Dhaka Lit Fest, which we do by bringing talents from home and abroad together for three scintillating days every November. DLF began with a pilot event in 2011 under the aegis of the world famous Hay-on-Wye festival. With three rapid iterations—2012, 2013 and 2014—the festival established Dhaka’s place in the global literary circuit. In 2015, the festival celebrated its fifth anniversary, and with Sadaf Saaz, Ahsan Akbar and K Anis Ahmed as directors of the festival, it assumed a new name—Dhaka Lit Fest—to mark its commitment to promoting Dhaka, and Bangladeshi literature and culture to the world. The festival is focused primarily on literature, but embraces culture and ideas more broadly, generating discussions on a wide array of topics: fiction and literary non-fiction to history, politics and society; poetry and translations; science and mathematics; philosophy and religion. About 400 participants representing over 50 countries have been part of DLF, including VS Naipaul, Adonis, Vikram Seth, Tariq Ali, Ahdaf Soueif, William Dalrymple, Nayantara Sahgal, Tilda Swinton, Shashi Tharoor, Shobha De, Nandita Das, Vijay Seshadri and Mohammed Hanif. Stalwarts of Bangla literature, Syed Shamsul Huq, Hasan Azizul Huq, Selina Hossain, Debesh Roy, Nirmalendu Goon, Joy Goswami, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay and others, have also of course graced the stage.