Bhubaneswar is set to host the 12th Kalinga Literary Festival (KLF) from January 8 to 11, 2026, at Mayfair Lagoon. The event, produced by the Odisha Diary Foundation, is widely recognised as a major global gathering for writers and thinkers.
The 2026 edition will feature more than 400 eminent speakers from India and abroad across five venues. The festival's programming will cover a vast range of topics, including fiction, poetry, history, science, philosophy, and current issues like AI, geopolitics, climate action, and mental health.
KLF is dedicated to celebrating India's diverse linguistic and literary heritage. The first list of speakers includes celebrated names such as Vikas Swarup, Anand Neelkanthan, Ram Madhav, Perumal Murugan, Divya Dutta, Preeti Shenoy, and Daisy Rockwell, among many others. The list includes a diverse mix of Booker and Sahitya Akademi awardees, cultural historians, artists, and scientists.
Alongside the literary events, KLF 2026 will also host the 10th Kalinga Art Festival, featuring painters, sculptors, and visual artists.
Ashok Kumar Bal, Writer, Festival Patron, and CEO, said, "Kalinga Literary Festival 2026 will be a landmark edition rooted in India's literary soul yet 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. At a time when the written word is competing with the digital din, KLF stands as a reminder that storytelling remains humanity's most enduring technology."
The festival is a long-running cultural initiative that has hosted over 5,000 speakers since 2012, and it plans to expand by hosting new international literary festivals in Colombo and Bali.
