A free, fully online literary festival streaming from August 13–15, 2026, is bringing together writers, publishers and scholars from across the Global South and its diasporas for three days of panels on borders, migration, identity and belief.

The Ananke Literature Festival, now in its seventh edition, runs under the theme 'Fault Lines: An Unmasking'. Sessions will stream on Ananke's YouTube channel and Facebook page, reaching anyone with an internet connection. The festival evolved from the Ananke digital media platform founded in 2014 by Sabin Muzaffar, a Karachi-born, Dubai-based journalist and media consultant, who created it to spotlight women's achievements and give young women across the Global South a digital space to find role models. Muzaffar has said the decision to hold the festival online was about accessibility — not a pandemic adaptation — so that geography never functions as a barrier to entry.

The 2026 programme carries several publishing partnerships. Readomania, an Indian publishing house, has curated three panels featuring 12 Indian authors, exploring themes of belonging, migration, and fiction's fault lines. The New Delhi-based feminist press Zubaan — a name familiar to readers of women's writing in India — has curated three panels of its own, timed to coincide with Women in Translation Month. Those panels cover feminist literature in translation, writing from the Northeast of India, and Zubaan's Poster Women archive, a project documenting the visual history of the women's movement in India through posters and printed ephemera.

Zubaan's translation panel brings together author and academic Sabah Mahmood Bashir, author Krupa Ge, and Rita Kothari, co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation. Usawa Literary Review, another participant, presents a session titled 'Listening When The Subaltern Speaks' — the phrase borrows from the academic concept of the subaltern, meaning those outside dominant power structures — featuring fiction and poetry.

Namrata Sharma, who runs a literary consultancy based in Mumbai, has served as festival director for three years. Before launching the festival, Muzaffar consulted publishers and media figures including Arpita Das of Yoda Press, Naveen Kishore of Seagull Books, Urvashi Butalia of Zubaan Books, Mehr F Husain of Zuka Books, Dipankar Mukherjee of Readomania, and Aekta Kapoor of eShe magazine.

Beyond the festival itself, Ananke runs virtual training and mentoring programmes for young women worldwide, covering advocacy, cyber safety, communication journalism, and digital journalism. The platform unveiled a new festival logo on June 23, 2026, and announced its speaker lineup on July 15. A press release on April 22 outlined the festival's shift to the 'Fault Lines' framing, stating it would reflect on historical, structural, and personal divisions.

For readers, the appeal is straightforward: a programme of literary conversations that would typically require a flight, a badge and a hotel room is available free on a phone screen. The trade-off — no signing queues, no chance encounter in a festival bookshop — is one Muzaffar has accepted from the start. Accessibility, she has argued, was always the point. (Publishing Perspectives)