Auckland Writers Festival 2026 line-up includes leading Indian & South Asian writers

The Auckland Writers Festival 2026 is considered one of the largest and most high profile literary festivals in New Zealand, covering one of the most important cultural events. Held annually in Auckland, the festival brings together writers, thinkers, journalists, poets, historians and artists of New Zealand and other parts of the world to have public discussions about books and ideas. The festival will be held from 12-17 May 2026. 

This year the festival is showcasing writers of Indian and South Asian heritage whose work falls into the fiction, poetry, translation and historical storytelling categories.

Their work addresses issues of migration, identity, language, climate change, and colonial history, which is a growing global presence of South Asian literature. The programme this year will involve both authors based in India and those of the diaspora whose work is based on the diverse cultural and historical experiences of countries and generations across the nations.

The Indian representation in the Auckland Writers Festival 2026 includes India-based writers like Amitav Ghosh, one of the most internationally recognised authors in India, and Deepa Bhasthi, a Karnataka-based literary translator between Kannada and English. Indo-Fijian and Irish-Indian authors Shana Chandra and Nikita Gill will also be representing topics on migration and mythology, respectively.

Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh is a famous Indian writer and one of the most renowned modern writers in world literature. He is best known for The Ibis Trilogy, a bestselling historical fiction series comprising Sea of Poppies (shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize), River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. Other fiction works, such as The Circle of Reason, a winner of the Prix Médicis étranger, and The Glass Palace, are devoted to history, empire, and motion throughout the regions. In addition to his fiction, Ghosh has authored influential nonfiction books such as The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable and The Nutmegs Curse: Parables of a Planet in Crisis that explore climate change, colonial history, and the human-nature relationship. His books have been widely internationally honored, notably with lifetime achievement awards, honorary doctorates, and the Jnanpith Award in 2018, the highest literary award in India. In 2015, he was also a finalist in the Man Booker International Prize and in 2024 he was awarded Erasmus Prize. At the Auckland Writers Festival 2026, Ghosh will attend sessions including A Shaken World Order? his featured conversation event, and Writing the Climate Reckoning. He will talk about climate change, global crisis, and how literature can assist in making sense of a fast changing world order influenced by history, empire, and disrupted environment.

Deepa Bhasthi

Deepa Bhasthi is a Kannada and English literary translator and writer, who works in Karnataka, India. She has translated local Indian literature into English, such as Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, and helped to introduce Kannada writing to the rest of the world. Her writing is devoted to translation as a means of transferring regional voice, culture and meaning across languages without distorting its original context. Awarded with the PEN Translates Award, her work in broader context contains cultural criticism, essays, journalism and a children's book ‘Champi and the Fig Tree’, which was published in Kannada and English. At the AWF 2026, she will be featured in the session as Translating with an Accent during which she will discuss how language and meaning are intertwined and how translation can retain and change literary voice, From East to West (and Back Again). At the festival she will speak about the politics and art of translation, the flow of stories across languages and cultures, and how regional writing in India can be transported into global literary spaces through translation.

Nikita Gill

Nikita Gill is an Irish-Indian poet, playwright, illustrator, and actor with a global following of nearly 850,000 on Instagram. Her work reimagines Greek and Hindu mythology and folklore, often centring women’s perspectives in traditional stories. She is the author of seven poetry collections and two verse novels, and has been nominated many times in awards, including the Goodreads Choice Award in poetry and longlisted for the Jhalak Prize. She also presents at big literary festivals and has given a TEDx Talk. She will attend Retelling Female Histories and To Hell and Back events where she will address mythology, telling stories, and re-reading female centric narratives.

Shana Chandra

Shana Chandra is a Tāmaki Makaurau–born writer, researcher, and educator of Indo-Fijian Girmitiya heritage, currently based in France. She writes about the history of her indentured-labourer ancestors, and how colonial history and displacement still influence identity and memory through generations. Her first novel, Banjara, has been published and has been featured in magazines such as Landfall, and in various international collections. She will feature at the Auckland Writers Festival 2026 in events such as A Heavy History: Girmitiyas in Fiji and Debut of the Day, where she will talk about her novel and the general history of the Girmitiya experience.

Over the years of the early 2000s, the festival grew steadily in size and reputation, bringing major international authors, as well as the most literary voices of New Zealand, on board. Its programming grew to include nonfiction and journalism as well as fiction and poetry, and cross-genre discussions and Indigenous storytelling