The Story
OrganizerThe Hyderabad Literary Festival emerged in 2010 from an unlikely starting point. The inaugural edition in 2010 was organised by Muse India, a literary web journal, and the Osmania University Centre for International Programmes (OUCIP), with the inaugural day at Hotel Green Park and subsequent events at OUCIP. This origin in a digital literary journal and a university's international engagement unit reflects the cosmopolitan, multilingual intellectual culture of Hyderabad, a city where Urdu, Telugu, English, and Hindi have historically coexisted within the same cultural life.
Hyderabad Literary Trust subsequently took over the organisation and transformed HLF into a consistently free, non-profit event with government support from Telangana Tourism. The festival's commitment to multilingualism has been structural from the beginning: each edition features a guest nation and an Indian language in focus, ensuring that Telugu and Urdu writing do not become secondary to the English-language sessions that dominate most Indian literary festivals.
The festival's evolution in terms of venue reflects its growth and ambition. After years in the older city's cultural venues, recent editions have been held at Sattva Knowledge City in HITEC City, the technology hub that has transformed Hyderabad's economic geography. This choice positions HLF as the literary festival of a city that is simultaneously one of India's oldest cultural centres and one of its newest economic ones.
By the 2026 edition, HLF featured nearly 300 speakers across three days, a scale that rivals festivals with significantly larger budgets, achieved through the Trust's model of broad partnership with academic institutions, publishing houses, and the state government.
HLF is significant because it has maintained a free admission policy and a genuine multilingual character across 16 years, resisting the pressures that push literary festivals toward premium ticketing and English-language dominance. The festival's guest nation model, which has featured countries from across Asia, Europe, and Africa in different editions, reflects Hyderabad's own historical identity as a city of cosmopolitan cultural exchange, shaped by the Nizamate's court culture, its position as a centre of Urdu poetry, and its contemporary status as a global technology hub.
HLF demonstrates that a free literary festival of national scale is achievable through a non-profit model with government and community support. Its multilingual and multi-disciplinary programming is a genuine model for how Indian cities can create literary events that reflect their actual cultural plurality.
Established a free multilingual literary festival in Hyderabad in 2010 and maintained it for 16 years. Pioneered the guest nation and Indian language in focus model. Created a non-profit trust model for festival organisation that has remained financially sustainable with government partnership.
