‘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, an initiative started in Australia.
Jane Camens, left, and Rukmini Bhaya Nair (pic by Menka Shivdasani/ "Every Tuesday")
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This enriching festival offered a unique blend of creative writing workshops, academic interaction, and public events. This celebration was the Partnership’s inaugural major event in what is anticipated will be an annual major celebration of writing from the region held in different locations each year throughout Asia or the Pacific.
It is hoped that these events will stimulate further local events. We believe this Festival was a timely start of an important new form of cultural cooperation which will provide valuable opportunities for new writers in the region for years to come.
It will eventually provide a forum that challenges 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.
This unique Festival, which combined a regional focus with a truly international reach, was a step towards raising the profile of the enormously rich literature and thought of the Asia Pacific region.
Registered participants included writers and scholars from Australia, Bangladesh, Fiji, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, UK and USA. The interest was a measure of the felt need for self-expression and interaction across the region.
Our 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
The Festival included the following activities:
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.