By-Soni Wadhwa, Assistant Professor, SRM University-AP
Executive Committee Member, Amaravati Literature Festival 2025
From 22 to 24 October in 2025, Amaravati Literature Festival will make its debut in the campus of SRM University-AP. It is a unique initiative. One, its organiser is a higher education institution, taking an opportunity to create a space for civic discourse on books, literature, and reading culture. And two, it’s about contributing to the vision of a new city, a new region; it is an experiment in reflections on identity making for a city. Because while Andhra Pradesh explores new possibilities of development and infrastructure, how can education and culture be left behind?
To understand what the festival means, one must go behind the scenes to see the roots and rhizomes that constitute its vision.
A Way of Celebrating a City
Cities and literature are intertwined in many ways. On the one hand, readers look forward to reading city novels: there’s the Bombay novel, the Kochi novel, the New York novel, the Delhi novel. Readers devour these novels for the images and glimpses they provide of their favourite corners in their cities. On the other hand, literature as an “industry” as we know it today is a very urban phenomenon. The idea of writing, printing, publishing, and circulating books materialised in cities.
Thus, just as literature has cities, cities have literature. Amaravati Literature Festival will bring the two together. But while every city deserves a literature festival to celebrate art and urbanism, having it especially for Amaravati makes sense.
Spaces are like people. When Salman Rushdie’s best known novel Midnight’s Children was released, it was welcomed as a phenomenon of “a subcontinent finding its voice.” Amaravati has always had a voice. As Amaravati re-emerges on the urban, cultural, and political scene as a capital or even as a space for dwelling, it is time to listen to what it wants to be.
Founded in 2014 on the banks of the Krishna river, Amaravati (literally speaking, “the abode of the immortals”), the name, stands for the capital of Swarga (heaven) itself. It has been the capital of several dynasties starting with the Satavahanas to the Nizams. As a place associated with a specific style or school of art, Amaravati is home to the arts and learning. The new literature festival aims to foreground these ideas of looking at history and articulate them as the ethos that we must place at the heart of the city as we build it today.
A Way of Celebrating a Literature
The caption to Amaravati Literature Festival is “Kotta nagaram, Kotta svaralu” (New City. New Voices). Amaravati will open up new challenges and questions for interacting with voices. As a city is being born, it is bound to make readers and writers create new materials and forms as literature. It could be a new take on identities in the aftermath of the bifurcation of the Telugu speaking states. It could be responding to the recent technological advancements and/or leveraging them. It could be about new ways of cultivating an audience and creating content. It could be about becoming entrepreneurs in publishing and influencing. It could be about imagining linguistic experiments. It could also be about finding new settings for stories and creating new spaces for stories too.
At Amaravati Literature Festival, we would see a blend of different languages such as Telugu and English to explore what different languages are producing as literature. The newness of voices in our caption refers to the visibility as a value embedded within the festival.
Different cities are discovering reading and literature in different ways. While book clubs and reading groups as an institution continue to bring readers together, newer models are coming up. The silent reading movement – for example, CubbonReads – is a way of promoting a reading culture. No pressure to analyse books. Just be there and read. The point is to create an atmosphere of reading and be around other readers, a community that understands the intimate nature of reading. Amaravati will gradually develop its own ideas and institutions of what to read and how to read. And reading of course means a way of making sense, internalizing, questioning, and defining leisure. This festival will be a market of things to look forward to every year. An occasion for reflection: what did we read this year? What’s being published this year? What will I re-read? What has made a comeback? And these are questions not just for the books in a city but for ideas in a city. One can imagine new institutions and conversations coming up through the festival: not just who are the new creators? What are their creations? But who are we as readers? Can there be a Reader of the Year Award?!
The mission behind the festival is this: “Our mission is to foster a love for literature, promote critical thinking, and provide a platform for emerging and established voices. We pride ourselves on creating an inclusive environment that engages all age groups and backgrounds. Beyond the literary sessions, ALF integrates art installations, local craft exhibitions, and culinary experiences, making it a holistic cultural extravaganza. Our commitment extends to community engagement, with outreach programs designed to bring the joy of reading to underprivileged communities.”
But the mission can unfold in a thousand different ways.
We invite all citizens and all readers — citizen-readers, for what kinds of citizens are we without being readers? — to take the intellectual charge of the city, read it as a book, write it anew, again, as a book.
Come to hang around the books. Come to hold them. Come to buy them. Come to get them signed by the authors. Come for the selfies. Come for stories. Come for poetry. Come for new ways of thinking. Come to be in the presence of other readers. Come to get inspired. To read. Come to get inspired to write. So come to find a mentor. Come to get away from screens. Come to transform your screens into books and instruments of reading.
We welcome you to Amaravati Literature Festival. Because this year, it falls on the dates after Diwali, it’s going to be a new way to extend the Festival of Lights into Lights of knowledge and pleasure.
