Author-politician Shashi Tharoor hosted the curtain raiser for the ninth edition of the Kerala Literature Festival in the national capital on 4 December 2025 – an event attended by diplomats, publishers, authors and cultural influencers. The curtain raiser officially announced Germany’s participation as the guest nation at KLF 2026, representing much more than diplomatic courtesy or cultural exchange.
Literature breeds beyond borders, stories transcend territorial boundaries and the written word weaves perhaps the most enduring bridge between nations, Tharoor said. “I think all of us who have read books in translation from German know from Thomas Mann’s profound meditations on art and society to Günter Grass’ unflinching examination of history. I featured Günter Grass in the epigraph to my Great Indian Novel, and I cherish my own conversations with him.”
Hermann Hesse’s spiritual wanderings deeply align with Indian philosophy, Tharoor said. “If you haven’t read Hesse, you’ve at least seen the movie Siddhartha (1972). And the sharp social commentary of Heinrich Böll. German literature has long engaged with questions that matter to thoughtful readers in India. Consider the writings of Hesse, whose Siddhartha, as I mentioned, remains a testament to the enduring connections between German and Indian thought,” he added.
He mentioned Bertolt Brecht’s revolutionary pulse in theatre and poetry, recalling as an undergraduate in Delhi University acting in a Miranda House production of Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards. “Brecht helped us transform in many ways the way in which we understand the relationship between art and social change,” he said.
“These are not merely German stories; they are human stories. They belong to all of us who seek meaning through literature. The dedicated German pavilion at the Kerala Literature Festival 2026 will offer audiences an immersive passage into contemporary German cultural identity.”
The spectacular light installation planned for Kozhikode Beach, designed by the artist Philipp Geist from Germany, will serve not as mere decoration but as a living metaphor – Illuminating the countless ways that stories travel, transform and kindle our shared humanity, Tharoor said.
The light installation will include the projection of letters and words from German and Malayalam, connecting the two cultures. In Tharoor’s words, when German and Indian storytellers gather on the warm sands of Kozhikode Beach, they will reaffirm literature’s timeless role in fostering compassion and creating thriving societies.
Ravi Deecee, chief facilitator of the Kerala Literature Festival, said, “We have a German pavilion, a light installation and we have a connection with Germany. A bit more back from the ages, actually, when Dr Hermann Gundert came as a missionary to propagate Christianity but ended up becoming a linguist. He became a newspaper man and he has done a dictionary, lexicography as well as the Bible in Malayalam. He is known as one of the early persons who nourished the Malayalam language. We have his grandson Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize winner from Germany.”
UNESCO designated Kozhikode as the first Indian city of literature in 2023 after the KLF started hosting its events in Kozhikode. “About 65% of our attendees below 35 years come far from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from the Middle East to Europe and elsewhere, Deecee said.
German Ambassador to India, Philipp Ackermann, said Germany’s rich literary tradition has shaped global thought and cultural exchange and its ongoing collaborations make it a valuable cultural partner for KLF.
“Kerala has an old tradition of reading and writing. Other authors in Malayalam and English are very famous – MT Vasudevan Nair, Vaikom Mohammed Basheer, O V Vijayan, K R Meera, Arundhati Roy, Dr Shashi Tharoor, Anita Nair, and Abraham Verghese. At KLF 2026, you will see a modern, colorful, artistic, diverse and reflective side of contemporary literature in Germany. It will be a fantastic concoction of different aspects of German literary life.”
Michael Heinst, director of Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore, said Hermann Gundert inspired his much more famous grandson, writer Hermann Hesse, and the novel Siddhartha, his Indian poem, as Hesse called it.
The idea for the German guest nation pavilion at KLF 2026, designed by the Purple Ink Studio from Bangalore, is rooted in Kozhikode, connecting to Germany’s traces found throughout Kerala, Heinst said. It will have a Berlin kitchen by artist Sanskriti Bist, a living room with a reading corner and a feminist library curated by Sandbox Collective, a music room for vinyl listening sessions, and a printing studio to mention some of the highlights, he added.
“The pavilion will have an amphitheater with a stage for our invited authors from Germany. They will share their ideas with our audience at KLF and engage in meaningful conversations with their fellow artists from India. The conversations with German authors such as Mithu Sanyal, Christopher Kloeble, Max Czolleck and Hadija Haruna will include topics such as migration and diaspora, feminist literature and identity politics, cultural history and culture of remembrance,” Heinst said.
There will be programs on innovative approaches to children’s literature, on comics and graphic novels, and on the importance of translation. “We will launch the Malayalam translation of Ingo Schulz’s novel, Die Rechtschaffenen Mörder, in the presence of the author and his translator, Professor Babu Thaliath.
KLF 2026 will host 17 countries, including the USA, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Norway, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Slovakia, Japan and Nigeria, making it India’s most globally represented literature conclave.
Nobel laureates, Booker Prize winners, historians, scientists, philosophers, activists, filmmakers, and artists will take part, creating hundreds of sessions that explore both the familiar and the new. The conversations will span fiction and non-fiction, politics and history, folklore and contemporary culture, science and philosophy.
Some of the attendees include prominent personalities such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Olga Tokarczuk, Abhijit Banerjee, Ben Johnson, Indra Nooyi, Cheyenne Olivier, Gabriela Ybarra, Arvind Subramanian, Peggy Mohan, Shobhaa De, Amish Tripathi, Piyush Mishra, Helen Molesworth, Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhasthi, Pico Iyer, Vandana Shiva, Pratibha Ray, Romila Thapar, Anita Nair, Volga, Neha Sinha, Prakash Raj, Pavan K Varma, and Shashi Tharoor.
The ninth edition of the Kerala Literature Festival (KLF) will be held from 22 to 25 January 2026, at the Kozhikode beachfront. It will feature over 400 speakers and 250 sessions spread across seven parallel tracks, with 10 sessions per track each day.
