What is the Galle Literary Festival?
For 59 years, independent Sri Lanka managed to function without an international Literary Festival that celebrated writing in English with a South Asian focus. There were various festivals and ceremonies, but none with this focus. Some of the festivals and ceremonies are decidedly local. The ones that garner the most publicity are the state literary festivals where political figures give speeches, where among other things they ascribe authorship of The old man and the sea to Guy de Maupassant In the 59th year of Independence, a group, including some people who own boutique hotels in the Galle area, thought up a plan to organize a literary festival. They invested their money in this enterprise, mobilized their connections, got a whole bunch of interesting authors to come to this war-torn land, ran some ads and the first Galle Literary Festival happened. It’s not known whether they made much money, but they did get the accolades: www.galleliteraryfestival.com Building on this success, th
