Kalinga Literary Festival is an annual literary festival organized by Odisha Diary Foundation and Kalinga Literary Festival Private. | Photo credit: Special arrangement
The temple city of Bhubaneswar is gearing up to welcome voices that enlighten and entertain as the 12th edition of the Kalinga Literature Festival (KLF) will be held from January 8 to January 11, 2026 at the Mayfair Lagoon with an impressive lineup of eminent writers and thinkers.
Organized and curated by Odisha Diary Foundation and jointly organized by Kalinga Literary Festival Private Limited, KLF 2026 will be held across five venues featuring over 400 eminent speakers and thought leaders from India and abroad.
The festival will run the gamut of human inquiry – fiction and poetry, history and heritage, science and sustainability, philosophy and politics, art and activism. In addition, it will focus on topics ranging from artificial intelligence and geopolitics to mental health, climate action, gender, identity and translation, KLF said in a statement.
This edition also includes lectures on literature, philosophy, art, music, film and the sciences.
The festival will feature prominent Booker Prize winners such as Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhasthi and Daisy Rockwell, and other prominent writers such as Perumal Murugan and Anand Neelkanthan among others.
KLF captures diversity and dynamism by featuring Booker and Sahitya Akademi award winners, as well as cultural historians, artists, diplomats, scholars and storytellers.
“Kalinga Literary Festival 2026 will be a landmark edition rooted in the Indian literary soul, but open to the winds of global thought. Our sessions will traverse the rich tapestry of human experience from mythology to machine learning, from village idioms to world literature. In an age when the written word competes with digital noise,” said Ashlling as the most resilient human technology, telling the story of Bala. CEO.
Alongside the literary celebrations, KLF 2026 will also host the 10th annual Kalinga Art Festival, bringing together painters, sculptors and visual storytellers in a spectacular display of creativity.
Since 2012, KLF has hosted more than 5,000 speakers and performers, creating a melting pot of ideologies and creativity.
In addition to its flagship festival, the KLF is also organizing an international literary festival in Kathmandu from 2022, which has attracted a wide range of speakers from various fields. In the future, KLF plans to host festivals in Colombo and Bali to rekindle the old ties that Kalinga shared with the peoples of Southeast Asia.
More details: Click here to go to the Kalinga Literary Festival website.
Published – 30 Oct 2025 13:14 IST
