The Ananke Literature Festival 2026 is delighted to announce that Readomania, the New Delhi-based independent publishing house, returns as a curating partner for the festival’s seventh edition with a strand of three panels featuring twelve authors, poets, translators, and scholars from across India. The sessions will air August 13–15, 2026, on Ananke’s YouTube channel and across its social media platforms.
Held fully online under the theme Fault Lines: An Unmasking, this year’s festival explores the visible and invisible fractures that shape lives across nations, communities, families, and the self. Readomania’s strand carries that inquiry into questions of cultural belonging, displacement and migration, and the emotional and social costs of survival — foregrounding storytelling that insists on nuance in an age of flattened narratives.
The partnership renews a longstanding association between Readomania and Ananke, whose collaborations across earlier editions of the festival have championed new and emerging voices in Indian writing in English.
Panel 1 — The Language of Belonging: How Preserving Cultural Heterogeneity Builds Global Empathy
Moderated by author and educator Anupama Jain, who also speaks on the panel, this session considers how safeguarding the plurality of languages, regions, and cultural registers in storytelling builds empathy across borders — asking what is gained when literature refuses to homogenise.
Anupama Jain (Chair & Speaker) — author of six acclaimed books and contributor to fourteen anthologies; her latest, Decoding The Gita — Ancient Wisdom, Modern Outlook, features in the FICCI Bologna Book Plus Rights Catalogue 2026. Founder of SeniorSchoolMoms, she mentors young writers and champions confident self-expression.
Atima Mankotia — author of the social satires Staring at the Square Moon and Better than Sex, with over 30 years of editorial experience across print, publishing, and digital media, including as communication specialist at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Debapriya Ghosh — former Western music presenter with All India Radio Kolkata and educator; author of And You Think I Don’t Know (Readomania, 2023) and The World of Tagore (Readomania, 2024), with a forthcoming book on Swami Vivekananda.
Aneeta Sharma — author of six books spanning self-awareness, memoir, and investigative and historical thrillers; member of the council for Global Education, WICCI, and SheoftheWorld, and creator of a bilingual poetry channel.
Panel 2 — Unmasking Memoirs: Personal Truths Across Borders
Moderated by writer and editor Monisha Raman, this panel navigates displacement, migration, and exile through the lens of the memoir — how personal truths travel across borders, and what it costs to tell them.
Monisha Raman (Chair & Speaker) — author of The Highlands of Yore (Readomania, 2025; Running Wild Press, 2026), whose essays and short stories trace the quiet connections between people and the land; an alumna of the Granta Writers’ Workshop in nature writing.
Debalina Haldar — IIM Lucknow alumna and Strategy Leader whose Wrinkles in Memory was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar 2020; her novel The Daughters of Shantiniketan (Readomania, 2025) won Best Title (Fiction-Romance) at the Authoropod Annual Awards 2026.
Mona Verma — award-winning author of ten books, Haiku and Tanka poet, and recipient of the Uttarakhand Ratan and Hindustan Times Woman of the Year; her work features in the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Indian Writing in English (2023).
Nishi Pulugurtha — academic, poet, editor, and translator; Head and Associate Professor in English at Brahmananda Keshab Chandra College, Kolkata, with fourteen books to her credit, most recently The Inheritance of Taste (Readomania, 2026).
Panel 3 — Fault Lines in Fiction: Writing the Fractures
Moderated by writer and pathologist Dr Shalini Mullick, this session goes to the heart of the festival’s theme — the emotional and social costs of survival and resilience, and how fiction renders the fractures that societies prefer to keep hidden.
Dr Shalini Mullick (Chair & Speaker) — writer, pathologist, and gender equity advocate; winner of the IGF Archer Amish Award, one of the world’s largest prizes for fiction writing, with a Jury Citation at the Laadli Media and Gender Sensitivity Awards.
Dr Harshali Singh — author of 31 books, poet, Member Judge of the District Consumer Commission, New Delhi, and Festival Director of the House of Harmony Literature Festival; recipient of the Munshi Premchand Literature Award and winner of Write India Season 2.
Avanti Sopory — author, columnist, educator, and research scholar chronicling Kashmir’s heritage in Dadi, Dantkatha and the Djinns (Kala Pratibha awardee, 2026), The Kashmir That Was, and Ancient and Lost Temples of Kashmir.
Nazia Kamali — Dehradun-based writer and AI trainer; author of The Woman Who Disappeared (Readomania, 2026), with shorter works in The Tint, FemAsia, Caustic Frolic, and other magazines.
A Word from Readomania
Dipankar Mukherjee
“Ananke has been much more than a literary festival; it has been a movement that has consistently made space for voices that deserve to be heard. As someone who has had the privilege of walking alongside this journey over the years, I’ve watched it create conversations that challenge, heal, and inspire. At Readomania, we believe books can change perspectives, and Ananke reminds us that stories can also change society. Here’s to many more years of fearless storytelling and meaningful dialogue,” said Dipankar Mukherjee, Publisher and Founder, Readomania Publishing.
A Word from Ananke
“Readomania has been a long time partner with this festival across editions, and its authors embody what Fault Lines: An Unmasking is about — writing that refuses to look away. Across these three panels, twelve voices take on belonging, displacement, and the quiet costs of resilience, reminding us that the stories of the Global South are not footnotes but the main text,” said Sabin Muzaffar, founder of the Ananke Literature Festival.
About Readomania
Readomania is an independent publishing house based in New Delhi, founded by Dipankar Mukherjee. Known for championing new and emerging Indian voices, it publishes literary fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, and curated anthologies that bring untold stories to the fore. Learn more at readomania.com.
About the Ananke Literature Festival
Launched in 2020 by Ananke (www.anankemag.com) — a digital media and development platform focused on technology, diversity, innovation, media, and literature across the Global South — the Ananke Literature Festival is a fully online event celebrated for creating meaningful conversations about the written word, publishing, diversity, empowerment, and social justice. Its seventh edition, themed Fault Lines: An Unmasking, airs August 13–15, 2026, with pre-recorded sessions broadcast on Ananke’s YouTube channel and across its social media platforms. Past speakers include Urvashi Butalia, Naveen Kishore, Feryal Ali Gauhar, Mohammad Hanif, Meena Kandasamy, and many more.
