‘Writing the Future’, India 2007

‘Writing the Future’ was the first festival of its type celebrating new writing from Asia and the Pacific. It was a joint initiative between the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership.

It challenged outmoded boundaries between academic and creative texts, between traditional pasts and technological futures, between the new and old media and between genres, cultures and institutions.

‘Writing the Future’ included creative writing workshops, a sympoisum, and public readings. The event was the Partnership’s inaugural major activity. The festival was a timely start to introducing the idea of creative writing programs to universities in the subcontinent and a start to regional dialogue on writing from the region.

Registered participants included writers and scholars from Australia, Bangladesh, Fiji, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, UK and USA.

The goals were to:

• bring the excitement of reading new literature to a wide audience across the region;

• enable young writers and university students to interact with well-known writers; and

• encourage cultural cross-talk & literary debate across a variety of regional languages

The program included creative writing workshops for emerging writers from the region, taught by writers of international repute – a festival feature that is familiar in the West but has never before been part of South Asian literary events. Emerging writers in the West have over the past decades gained tremendous benefit and advantage from workshops with peers and established writers, but there are few equivalent opportunities in Asia. This festival aimed to be a step towards changing this situation.

Translation workshops, undertaken in collaboration with the Indian Academy of Letters and the Jamia Millia University. These workshops were held in four languages, Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam and Tamil.

A major academic conference on new writing from Asia and the Pacific. The conference examined contemporary writing from the region, the value of writing programs, the contrasts and synergies between traditional oral forms of literature and new forms of writing influenced by multi-media, the state of national literary studies, and notions of writing in relation to regional, hybrid and/or diasposric identities globalization, cosmopolitanism, post-colonialism, and other associated issues. The conference crossed several disciplines, from literature to culture and social studies and psychology.

Public events featuring established writers and performers of international repute. These included readings by emerging and established writers; panel discussions with publishers, literary agents, and writers; book launches; and cultural performance by Indian poets, theatre-people and singers.