Ananke Women in Literature Festival 2024 to create space for diverse thoughts, experiences with agency

The fourth edition of Ananke’s flagship Women in Literature Festival is set to take place from April 23 – 25, 2024. Happening in the month of World Book Day, the three-day virtual event strives to create a space, a collective, where a diverse set of voices – especially women from the Global South – can come together to share their thoughts, vision, and lived experiences with agency. 

Taking cue from the current global status quo, events, rhetoric and narratives emerging across the world, ‘Language and Erasure’ has been selected as the main theme of the festival this year.

The event will be livestreamed on Ananke’s Facebook page. eShe is proud to be an ally and partner once again.

Sabin Muzaffar, the Dubai-based founder of Ananke, welcomed eShe onboard, sharing, “eShe has been a long term Ananke partner and ally for not just the Women in Literature Festival but also our Girl Summit. And these alliances have produced amazing outcomes in terms of impactful conversations and great learning especially for university students, whom we had on-boarded to mentor and train. I am excited for our audience to experience the same magic this year as well.”

Ananke’s Women in Literature Festival 2024 aims to mobilise change by initiating dialogue across language, politics, and socio-cultural boundaries. Over the past decade, humankind has seen the world grapple with increasing division, desensitisation, and lack of compassion.

Traditional and new media have played a pivotal role in amplifying such polarisation through its use of propaganda, warped and divisive optics, and manipulative messaging.

Ananke believes in creating space for imagination, creativity, and dialogue as fundamental values upon which just, and equitable societies are built and sustained. Artists, poets, writers, painters, filmmakers, journalists, photographers, musicians, and audiences – all have a role to play as catalysts of change.

Modern uses of language, and by extension communication, are suffused with euro-centric ideologies and perceptions of the ‘human’, inevitably excluding those on the ‘margins of modernity’ and deemed the ‘other’. How have such oppressive exclusions, built through language, created pathways to dislocation, alienation, dehumanisation, and subsequently, annihilation?

The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o reminds us that the colonised have been dismembered through the erasure of their language.

At this year’s literary festival, Ananke invites participants to share collective and individual experiences, narratives, and histories through conversations, art, and literature that grapple with the dilemmas of language, violence, and erasure.

Together, we will ask what we mean by ‘human’. With this vision in mind, Ananke WLF 2024 invites individuals, communities and peoples of the world to attend the festival to imagine change.

A collective endeavour, Ananke’s Women in Literature Festival is produced in partnership with (in alphabetical order) Ala Books and Authors, BookBot, eShe, Kitaab, Keemiya Creatives, Neem Tree Press, Readomania, Reverie Publishers, Sapan, Seagull Books, Trace Press,Yoda Press, Zubaan Books, and Zuka Books.

Ananke’s Women in Literature Foundation’s advisors include Zubaan Books’ Urvashi Butalia, Seagull Books’ Naveen Kishore, Yoda Press’s Arpita Das, Neem Tree Press’s Archna Sharma, and author, poet, translator Naima Rashid.