Ooty Literature Festival 2025 begins

Ooty Literature Festival 2025 brings engaging discussions, immersive experiences, and transformative storytelling

Who is an Indian? What defines identity in a land as diverse as India? A question that resonates across time kickstarts the conversation at the opening day of the Ooty Literature Festival 2025 on March 14 at the iconic Nilgiri Library in Udhagamandalam.

At a bilingual session in English and Tamil, Dr Ganesh Devy, a scholar, linguist, and cultural activist who has dedicated his life to documenting and preserving India’s linguistic heritage, explores India’s evolving identity. As the founder of the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, Dr Devy has been instrumental in mapping and safeguarding over 700 languages, ensuring that India’s diverse linguistic landscape is recognised and valued.

He will be honoured with Lifetime Achievement Award. Writer Perumal Murugan received his Lifetime Achievement Award for fostering literary arts and culture in Tamil Nadu at the previous edition of the festival in 2023 that brought issues like climate change, gender sensitivity, and man-animal conflict to the forefront.

OLF 2025 brings together leading thinkers, writers, and cultural icons to explore stories that challenge perspectives, ignite curiosity, and inspire change. There will be two days of thought-provoking discussions, immersive experiences, and transformative storytelling with some of the sharpest minds and creative voices. It covers topics across literature, history, music, politics and wellness..

While veteran journalists Rajdeep Sardesai and Sreenivasan Jain provide an in-depth analysis of the 2024 elections, breaking down the narratives that shaped India’s political landscape, a conversation with Mani Ratnam offers a glimpse into the art of Indian storytelling and cinema, exploring the director’s creative process and the evolution of filmmaking in India.

The Poetry Corner session brings together four poets — Michael Cerighton, Dion D’Souza, Akhil Katyal and Sukirtharani — as they weave stories of identity, love, resistance and belonging through verse.

Speakers like R Gopalakrishnan, Rama Bijapurkar and Shalini Kapoor debate the evolving dynamics of business in the AI era, exploring the balance between human intuition and machine intelligence. Kris Srikkanth relives India’s iconic victory at his session on life’s lessons from the 1983 World Cup win.