The Ananke Literature Festival 2026 will host Kintsugi of Chronotopal Schisms through Contemporary Literature, a keynote by author and scholar Dr. Syrrina Ahsan Ali Haque. The session airs at the festival’s seventh edition, August 13–15, 2026, on Ananke’s YouTube channel and across its social media platforms. Dr. Haque also appears elsewhere in the programme, including a conversation on the writing retreat and panels on South Asian literature.
Held fully online under the theme Fault Lines: An Unmasking, this year’s festival examines the visible and invisible fractures that shape lives across nations, communities and the self. Dr. Haque’s keynote takes that inquiry to its most hopeful edge: not the breaking, but what can be made of the break.
About the Keynote
Kintsugi — the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold — repairs a vessel without disguising the fracture, and leaves it more valuable for having been broken. Dr. Haque takes that idea as her frame for reading contemporary fiction: time and space fractured by partition, trauma, war and gendered constraint can be reassembled through narrative, with literature adding to the fractured space over time rather than subtracting from it.
Reading across the work of William Dalrymple, Faiqa Mansab, Romesh Gunesekera and Kanza Javed — and drawing on her own fiction and criticism — she argues that restoration through literature is a dialogic process, a conversation held between past, present and future. Her keynote turns on a proposition of her own: if “fiction is a lie that tells the truth,” then truth becomes fiction the moment it is retold. Narratives of resilience rest on memory, and memory is the least reliable witness of all — placing its own distance between the teller and the moment. The talk makes the case for fiction as the form best able to rejoin fractured time and space, and to offer new ways of seeing a fault line.
In Her Words
“Ananke Literature Festival 2026 with its theme ‘Fault lines: An Unmasking’ offers a means to shed off the facade of a safe zone like home and look beneath the surface at the fissures and fractures due to persistent friction and compression. The array of topics this year, interweave fragmented spaces, forming a nexus for a release through a veiny rhizome of dialogue and stories, reinvigorating the ruptured inhabitants of lands built on fault lines.”
— Dr. Syrrina Ahsan Ali Haque, Lahore, Pakistan
About the Speaker
Dr. Syrrina Ahsan Ali Haque, Visiting Professor, former Head DELL, UOL, teaches English Literature, Creative, Academic Writing, and Research Methodology at Kinnaird College for Women, University of Lahore, University at Buffalo-SUNY USA, Lahore School of Economics, LGSIDP-University of London, Government College University. She has completed her fellowship (Postdoc) from University at Buffalo, USA. Dr. Haque’s first book, Sand in the Castle: A Collection of Short Stories was published in USA in 2010 and is being taught in USA and Pakistan. Her second book, an academic non-fiction, Cultural Confessions in Khaled Hosseini’s Works, was published in 2017. Her third book, Dialogue on Partition: Literature Knows No Borders, 2021; Publisher: Bloomsbury, is being taught in USA, India and Pakistan. Her fourth book, A Cartographic Journey of Race, Gender and Power: Global Identity is edited by her. Haque’s upcoming novel, Mynah: A Saga of Migrations will be launched in UK, USA, Australia, India and Pakistan in 2026.
Her Book Manuscript, Dialogue on Partition: Literature Knows No Borders has won Book Award at NeMLA 51st Convention, Boston, USA. She has held many talks at universities as well as on television and conducted workshops on literary criticism, writing, academic as well as creative across the globe. She has been writing as a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines. Her research articles and chapters have also been published in scholarly journals and books published by Routledge and Cambridge Scholars. Her research paper received the Best Paper award in Japan. She has won Summer Fellowship Award, USA. Dr. Haque was placed on the Principal’s Roll of Honor list.
A Word from Ananke
“Dr. Haque gives us the most generous possible reading of a fault line — not only as damage, but as the seam where something can be rejoined, and rejoined visibly. That is what literature does at its best, and it is exactly the conversation this festival was built to hold,” said the organisers of the Ananke Literature Festival.
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.
