The Story
OrganizerThe Indore Literature Festival has grown, since its founding in 2015, into one of the most important events in the cultural calendar of Indore and, by its own account, the largest literary festival in Central India. It was founded by Pravin Sharma, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Hello Hindustan media group and once the youngest editor at Naidunia, who had earlier organised the Indo-Pak Kavi Sammelan and Mushaira Sarhadon Se Aagey. The festival is run each year by the Indore Literary Program Organizing Society (ILPOS), a body of thinkers, intellectuals and artists of the city.
Every year, the festival brings a galaxy of thought-leaders to Indore, acclaimed poets, writers, thinkers, theatre artists, management gurus, musicians and sports personalities among them, to share ideas intended to enrich perspectives and encourage positive change. Its programme is deliberately varied, offering discussion and debate sessions, talks, storytelling, poetry recitation, prose readings, speeches, interviews, theatrical shows, music sessions and felicitations, with something for every age and taste, and it draws large numbers of the old and young alike.
For its organisers, the festival's greatest success has been social rather than literary: the creation of a thriving, durable community in Indore that shares a passion for art, culture and literature. In a media environment increasingly dominated by screens and apps, ILF positions itself as a space that draws people back to books, ideas and live human exchange, and over successive editions it has become a fixture that the city looks forward to each year.
The Indore Literature Festival's significance lies in bringing a substantial, multi-disciplinary literary festival to Central India, a region less served by the marquee litfests of Delhi, Jaipur and the metros. By gathering writers, poets and thinkers, and by mixing literature with theatre, music and debate, it broadens access to literary and intellectual culture in a major but often overlooked city, and it deliberately spans languages, ages and forms. Its founders' emphasis on building a lasting local community of readers and culture-lovers points to a grassroots model of festival-making rooted in a single city's civic life rather than in national spectacle.
As India's literary-festival culture matures, events like the Indore Literature Festival matter for spreading that culture beyond the metros and building durable reading communities in tier-two cities. Its mix of poetry, prose, debate and performance, and its free, broad-based character, make literary culture accessible in Central India. For the Atlas, ILF is a useful node in mapping the geographic breadth of India's literary life and the civic institutions that sustain it.
