Jaipur Literature Festival Announces 2026 Edition Theme: 'Borders of Language'

JLF 2026 to Explore 'Borders of Language'

The Jaipur Literature Festival has unveiled the theme and preliminary programme for its 2026 edition, titled "Borders of Language." The festival, held annually at the Diggi Palace in Jaipur and widely regarded as the world's largest free literary gathering, will run for five days and feature 450 confirmed speakers from 57 countries across 280 sessions in the main venue, with satellite events in eight Indian cities.

Co-directors Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple described the theme as a response to a convergence of urgent global questions. "The year ahead will see greater pressure on linguistic minorities than at any point in living memory. Simultaneously, AI translation is raising profound questions about what it means for a text to exist in a language, and whether machine translation can carry the soul of a literary voice across linguistic borders. These are questions that only a literary festival — a gathering of writers who have lived inside languages — can properly explore," Dalrymple said.

Highlights from the Announced Programme

The programme for 2026 includes a dedicated strand of sessions on endangered languages, with linguists, poets, and oral tradition carriers from communities whose languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers presenting sessions on preservation, digital archiving, and the relationship between language loss and cultural displacement. The Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups from northeastern India are among the communities whose literary traditions will be spotlighted.

Nobel Prize in Literature winner Olga Tokarczuk has confirmed her participation, with a marquee conversation on "the politics of translation and the responsibilities of the translator." Salman Rushdie will deliver the inaugural address, his first major public literary appearance in India since his stabbing in 2022. The South Asian fiction panel will include the most recent Booker Prize winner alongside three first-novel writers from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh — a structural choice by the curators that reflects JLF's commitment to platforming new voices alongside established names.

AI and Literary Creation Sessions

Three dedicated sessions on artificial intelligence and literature have been included in the programme, addressing questions about AI-generated fiction, the legal and ethical status of training large language models on copyrighted literary works, and the prospects for AI as a tool in the preservation and extension of endangered literary traditions. A live demonstration session will feature a writer working in real-time collaboration with an AI writing tool, with the audience invited to interrogate the creative process.

Festival registration opens in October, and access to all general sessions remains free. Premium author dinner and masterclass events will be available on a ticketed basis, with proceeds going to the JLF School Outreach Programme, which brings authors and storytellers to government schools across Rajasthan year-round.