The Story
OrganizerKhushwant Singh (1915-2014) was one of India's most beloved and provocative writers: author of Train to Pakistan, editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, and a man who combined literary seriousness with irreverence, championed Indo-Pakistan friendship when it was unfashionable, wrote about sex and death with a directness unusual in Indian public culture, and spent his final decades in his beloved Kasauli home. The festival his foundation created carries all of these commitments: ecology is always on the programme because Singh was a committed environmentalist; Indo-Pakistan friendship because he believed in it throughout his life; women's equality because he wrote about and supported it. Kasauli, the charming HP hill station where Singh had his home and wrote much of his best work, is exactly the right setting: intimate, literary, beautiful, and slightly beyond the mainstream. The festival also has a London edition, most recently at Sutton Central Library (June 2026), reflecting Singh's years of study and work in the UK.
KSLF carries the values of one of India's most distinctive public intellectuals into an annual gathering that takes those values seriously. The ecology-literature-Indo-Pakistan axis is genuinely unusual in a litfest landscape dominated by mainstream literary celebrity. The Kasauli setting, where Singh actually lived and wrote, gives it an authenticity of place that few festivals have.
Visit the Khushwant Singh Literary Festival in Kasauli to enjoy books, ideas and conversation in the crisp air of the Himalayan foothills, in the hill town the writer loved. Honouring Khushwant Singh's irreverent, humane spirit, its intimate scale and mountain setting foster the kind of unhurried literary exchange the grand festivals cannot, drawing leading authors and engaged audiences to one of India's most characterful book gatherings.
