The Ananke Literature Festival 2026 will host a special strand of programming curated by Zubaan Books, the pioneering independent feminist publishing house and one of the festival’s longest-standing partners. Four online panels — on literary translation, writing from the Northeast, the landmark Poster Women archive, and food as a gendered archive of memory — will air at the festival’s seventh edition, 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, and the self. Zubaan’s strand extends that inquiry into questions of language, region, and memory — foregrounding women’s voices as writers, translators, editors, and archivists across South Asia. Timed to coincide with Women in Translation (WIT) Month, the panels celebrate literary work that too often goes unheard beyond its own geographies.
The collaboration builds on a long association between the two organisations. Zubaan’s co-founder and publisher, Urvashi Butalia, is among the esteemed literary figures who have guided Ananke over the years, serving as an advisor to the festival and delivering an opening address at an earlier edition.
Panel 1 — Women Translating Women: Feminist Literature in Translation
Opening the festival’s WIT Month programming, this panel celebrates Zubaan’s Women Translating Women series — a growing list that pairs women writers with women translators to carry feminist storytelling across languages. Six titles are already in print, with more to come, and the session brings together translators from the series to discuss the craft, politics, and intimacy of translating women’s writing.
Titles in the series include:
Hidden Treasure by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay, translated from the Bengali by Ipsa S (2024)
Unmoored by Ramachandran Usha, translated from the Tamil by Krupa Ge (2024)
A New World Romance by Susham Bedi, translated from the Hindi by Astri Ghosh (2024)
Ittehad: A Life Together by Guli Sadarangani, translated from the Sindhi by Rita Kothari (2025)
Other Skies, Other Stories by Sara Rai, translated from the Hindi by Ira Pande and the author (2025)
Darkness and Other Stories by Razia Sajjad Zaheer, translated from the Urdu by Saba Mahmood Bashir (2025)
Panel 2 — Writings from the Northeast
This panel gathers editors and contributors from Zubaan’s acclaimed Writings from the Northeast series, a landmark anthology project that has, since 2019, mapped women’s literary and lived experience across the region. With the seventh volume, Beneath Magnolia Skies: Writings from Sikkim and Darjeeling Hills — edited by Mona Chettri and Prava Rai — published towards the end of 2025, the series now spans seven states and hill regions. The session reflects on building an archive of writing that resonates with the festival’s exploration of hidden voices of the Global South.
The series comprises:
Crafting the Word: Writings from Manipur
The Many That I Am: Writings from Nagaland
The Inheritance of Words: Writings from Arunachal Pradesh
The Keepers of Knowledge: Writings from Mizoram
We Come From Mist: Writings from Meghalaya
Riverside Stories: Writings from Assam
Beneath Magnolia Skies: Writings from Sikkim and Darjeeling Hills
Panel 3 — Poster Women: An Archive of the Women’s Movement
The third session turns to Poster Women, Zubaan’s pioneering visual archive documenting the poster art of the Indian women’s movement. The panel features Zubaan colleagues who work closely with the Poster Women and Media Archive collections, discussing how these images chronicle decades of feminist campaigning and the work of digitising and preserving them. The session is accompanied by a digital display of selected posters from the archive during the festival.
Panel 4 — What Food Refuses to Forget: The Gendered Labour of Remembering Home
The fourth session brings together fellows of Zubaan’s Culinary Lab Fellowship, which works across the Northeast and the Himalayas. Pema Yangden Lepcha is a researcher from Dzongu, of the Indigenous Lepcha community, whose work sits at the intersection of culture, biodiversity and livelihoods. Jigdol Tenzing Gyalpo Bhutia is an assistant professor of environmental studies in Sikkim who documents food systems and everyday practice in the Eastern Himalayas through writing and photography. Nomika Tamang, from Darjeeling, tells stories through writing, illustration, film and her illustrated food journals.
The conversation is moderated by Tenzin Choedon, Programme and Research Coordinator at Zubaan, where she runs the Northeast and Himalaya programmes including the Culinary Lab Fellowship. A Tibetan feminist researcher whose work is shaped by her own experience of displacement, she is drawn to storytelling that emerges from the margins.
Kitchens keep records that archives do not: what was cooked in a season of scarcity, which recipe crossed a border with a family, whose labour made the meal and whose name went unwritten. The panel asks what food refuses to forget — and who has been doing the remembering.
A Word from Ananke
“Our partnership with Zubaan reaches back to the very foundations of this festival, and it feels fitting to mark Women in Translation Month with them. These three panels place women — as writers, translators, editors, and keepers of an archive — at the centre of the story, insisting that literature from the margins is not peripheral but essential,” said the organisers of the Ananke Literature Festival.
A Word from Zubaan
“We’re delighted to be partnering with Ananke again. The Ananke festival is something we look forward to every year – for its openness, its commitment to variety, the ways in which it traverses borders and cements friendships, and brings together diverse voices and partnerships that are open and free. This year we bring voices from the Northeastern region of India, the experience of creating a free, accessible visual archive about women’s histories and a project, created collaboratively with Ashoka University’s Centre for Translation, on women translating the works of women,” said Founder and Publisher Zubaan Books, Urvashi Butalia.
About Zubaan Books
Zubaan is an independent feminist publishing house based in New Delhi. It publishes academic books, fiction, memoirs, and popular non-fiction, as well as books for children and young adults under its Young Zubaan imprint, aiming always to be pioneering, cutting-edge, progressive, and inclusive. Learn more at zubaanbooks.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.
