Bengaluru gets ready for fourth edition of Green Lit Fest

Bengaluru: Come December, the IT hub will be spoiled for choice with 500-plus events exploring art, music and literature. Between November 30 and December 15, Bengaluru Habba 2024 will transform the city’s public spaces into cultural hubs.

One among them is a day-long literature festival that aims to mainstream books on the environment. The 4th edition of GreenLit Fest (GLF) will be held on December 7 at Cubbon Park’s Century Club. According to Benedict Paramanand, the founder of the festival, although there are dime-a-dozen literature festivals in India, literature on environment could manage a session or two in those festivals. “But there were so many books on the environment. This is why we decided to start the festival in 2021. In the course of three years, GLF managed to become a vibrant platform for promoting nature writing, reading, filming, nature photography and art. It organises green dialogues, festivals, book launches, workshops, and green walks,” said Paramanand to PTI.

Thanks to its popularity, this year, the festival will be clubbed with Bengaluru Habba. But neither the book festival nor the climate issues were new to him, said Paramanand. “We just held the 10th edition of the other literature festival that I founded, Bangalore Business Literature Festival. I have also been featuring climate issues in my advocacy platform, an e-magazine called Sustainability Next. You can say GLF is an extension of Sustainability Next,” added Paramanand.

Couple of years ago, GLF also came up with a special literary exchange involving educational institutions called a ‘Literature Across Borders’, said Paramanand. He said the first edition of the exchange involved students of MA Writing for Young People Programme at Bath Spa University in the UK and the MA English students of Ashoka University, India.

“As part of the exchange, the books from India have made their way to students in the UK and the books from the UK have made their way to students in India,” added Paramanand. GLF 2024, said Paramanand will feature conversations on topics such as the Nilgiris, Rewilding, Climate Tech, India’s Exquisite Trees, and India’s opportunities with Green Transition and Entrepreneurship.

“This year’s highlights include a separate Children’s Festival at the fringes of GLF. We also have a panel discussion on ‘Climate Anxiety to Climate Action – The Writers’ Pitch’ with Matthew Pye, Alister Scott and Rajan Mehta as well as workshops for teachers, journalists and aspiring writers,” said Paramanand. This year, six children’s books on environment, five under the category of Green Business and five fiction/non-fiction exploring climate issues have been shortlisted, said Paramanand.

“On December 7, three titles are awarded in each category – one GLF Book of the Year and two Honour Books. The idea behind awarding three books is to give readers a sense of the range of books on the environment coming out of India and build readership for this literature,” said Paramanand. GLF 2024 Honour Book Awards will be given away by Suresh Heblikar, environmentalist, Kannada filmmaker and actor, added Paramanand.