Seven years on and this bizarre speed-dating for literature continues to draw crowds.


India is of course the land of more languages than any sane person would care to count, so perhaps it’s not so surprising that an event that brings writers from eleven European nations to read their work out aloud in their own native European language is a crowd-puller.

Among the countries represented will be Finland, Estonia, Portugal, Austria, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Czech, France and Hungary, in person (except Ireland’s James Joyce who inconsiderately died a while back so someone will read for him).

Who could imagine a similar event, with authors reading out excerpts in ten different languages, being a crowd puller in the US or UK?

But every year in India the event pulls the crowds, in person every year except 2021 when it was online for obvious reasons.

Read more at The Indian Express.