Galaxy of literary stars at Kalam; Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, Banu Mushtaq and more
Telegraph | 28 December 2025
The 14th edition of Kalam, the Exide Kolkata Literary Meet, will bring together a constellation of award-winning writers who have shaped contemporary literary discourse.
The five-day festival will be held from January 22 to 26, with an epilogue on January 27, and will be hosted for the first time at the Alipore Museum.
Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, Barbara Kingsolver, Amitav Ghosh and Banu Mushtaq will be among the headline speakers.
Jhumpa returns to the festival after a gap of 12 years, while Desai will speak on her Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Mushtaq will discuss Heart Lamp, which won the Booker International Prize.
The festival will open with readings from the works of Mahasweta Devi, as her birth centenary begins on January 14. Kalam will also mark a series of upcoming centenaries in January 2026, celebrating the legacies of Ritwik Ghatak, Guru Dutt, Uttam Kumar and M.S. Swaminathan, alongside Mahasweta Devi.
Amitav Ghosh will launch his new novel Ghost-Eye at the festival. Ghosh was recently awarded South Korea’s highest literary honour, the Pak Kyongni Prize. The festival’s epilogue on January 27 will feature Nobel laureate economist Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee.
Memoirs will form another strong strand, with speakers including New York-based fashion designer Prabal Gurung and actor-singer Piyush Mishra. Booker International Prize-winning translator Daisy Rockwell will speak about her debut novel, Alice Sees Ghosts. A spectral theme runs through several sessions, extending to Aruna Chakravorty’s latest book, Arundhati Nath’s translation of Bengali ghost stories, and Sanjoy Roy’s debut memoir.
Crowd favourites Durjoy Datta, Shobhaa De and Nandita Das are also part of the line-up.
“The festival has a remarkable number of books engaging with climate change and dystopian worldviews, across fiction and non-fiction,” said Malavika Banerjee, the festival’s curator. “Amitav Ghosh, Barbara Kingsolver, Keshava Guha, Sarnath Banerjee and Megha Majumdar all come with novels that speak about a time that is dystopian and yet oddly enough, seem like the here and now.”
Kalam will continue its signature After Words segment, where each day concludes with a performance in music, theatre or dance. Performances by Sourendra-Soumyojit, Rupam Islam’s Ekak, and the play Chandaa Bedni is scheduled over the first four days. The festival will close on Republic Day evening with a sarod recital by Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangash.
This year’s focus state is Maharashtra, with five sessions exploring its contributions to literature, Hindustani classical music, theatre and cinema. Authors Shanta Gokhale and Shobhaa De, musicians Ashwini Bhide-Deshpande and Suresh Talwalkar, and filmmaker Chaitanya Tamhane will participate in these discussions.
Cinema will have a dedicated segment titled Talkies, featuring six sessions on the works of Ritwik Ghatak and Guru Dutt, as well as conversations on contemporary cinematic trends.
Bengali literature sessions will include Srijato, Bratati Bandyopadhyay, Nalini Bera, Chandril Bhattacharya, Anupam Roy, Arunava Sinha and Dipanwita Roy, among others.
The Junior Kolkata Literary Meet will mark its 10th edition and will be held in two parts on January 22 and 27, coinciding with the long weekend.
Jayanta Sengupta, director of the Alipore Museum, said hosting the festival was a privilege. “The Kolkata Literary Meet is one of the most eagerly anticipated cultural events in the city’s calendar. It aligns with Hidco’s efforts to open up this historic space for high-quality cultural programmes,” he said.