The 2025 edition of Ananke’s Festival of Literature welcomes another year of meaningful collaboration with one of its key allies, Readomania. The three-day digital event, beginning on April 29th and concluding on World Labor Day, May 1st, 2025 will live-stream engaging panel discussions and dialogue on its YouTube Page.
The event will host a series of Readomania panels focusing on topics including: Storytelling and Contemporary Feminism, Emerging Voices from South Asia, Building a Career in Writing and Women Voices, Unconventional Themes.
Readomania is an independent publishing house that drives narratives, influences points of view, aspires to be a catalyst for change, and provides meaningful entertainment to readers. It started in September 2014 and the annual publishing list was streamlined from 2016 onwards. The list includes literary, midlist, and commercial fiction across multiple genres, short stories, poetry, non-fiction, and children’s fiction. The current focus of the publishing programme is diversity in content. The publishing house wants to bring in as many flavors as possible. They are delving into mythology retelling, historical fiction, period drama, crime, thriller, romance, short stories, poetry, children’s fiction, humor etc.
Talking about the collaboration and the festival, Founder Readomania, Dipankar Mukherjee said: “We are proud of our partnership with Ananke, an organisation that is doing phenomenal work for the last 10 yrs, in bringing women voices to the forefront. The association brings in joy and happiness to our authors and readers.”
Readomania aims to bring new voices in language and literature to the fore, and has for a decade introduced authors, short story writers, and poets from all walks of life to Indian Writing in English, enriching and broadening the scope of writing in India from various perspectives. A majority of Readomania authors are women, and this has strengthened the publishing house’s resolve to align with partners such as the Ananke Literature Festival, that celebrate free speech and freedom of expression.
“I am absolutely thrilled to see this amazing partnership with Readomania continue, thrive and keep on growing. We have had some many engaging and impactful conversations take place and this has always been our mutual goal - cross cultural exchange, initiating positive narratives and offering diverse as well as alternative perceptions for our audience. This can only be possible with partners like Dipankar and Readomania!” said Sabin Muzaffar, Founder Ananke and Festival Director.
This year’s Festival theme is Speaking Truth to Power. The 2025 Edition of Ananke’s Festival of Literature (AnankeWLF) arrives at a time when the world is yet again facing an onslaught on free speech and freedom of expression that fights against the tyranny of censorship, neo-colonial regimes of oppression, cantankerous clamor of information and systemic indoctrination. Moving past the time of looking back, taking stalk and reflecting, this is the moment of subversive discourse and speaking truth to power.
Readomania’s foray into the digital world, trying to bring new kinds of writing online through its online publishing platform uphold the values of the festival theme and its current outlook. Readomania Publishing promotes truth to power by believing in inclusivity, diversity and equality of all those who access its online platform as readers, writers, authors and poets. It has partnered with the festival in the past based on shared notions of utilizing technology with maximum outreach and accessibility, and converging cultural affinities.
In the fifth edition of the festival, conversations will focus on the manufacturing and production of truth and its relationship with the hegemony of socio-economic, cultural and political structures, apparatuses as well as consciousness. The phenomena of power and that of voice in post-modern, neo-colonial, and digital dystopian times, wielded, leveraged and embodied in politico-economic and social structures and ensembles but also by the sub-altern and the zeitgeist of our present time.
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