Celebrating Words and Wanderlust at Yaanam: India’s First Travel–Literary Festival in Varkala

Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala Tourism is setting the stage for Yaanam, the country’s first travel, literary festival, to be held on October 17, 18, and 19 at Rangakala Kendram on the Varkala Cliff. The gathering is designed as a meeting point between the written word and the road, a place where travellers and storytellers find common ground in the rhythm of journeys, long trains, and the scattered notes of memory.

Centred on the theme Celebrating Words and Wanderlust, the festival aims to place Kerala more firmly on the international map of travel literature. With a world increasingly curious about stories that rise from movement and terrain, Yaanam hopes to draw together writers, readers, and wanderers from across continents, those who treat travel not as leisure alone, but as a way of making sense of the world’s unevenness.

Over fifty speakers from India and abroad are expected. It’s not a celebrity parade but a shared conversation among writers, artists, filmmakers, vloggers, adventurers, and food storytellers, people who’ve spent their lives chasing roads, light, and local flavour.

Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka, writer K R Meera, and journalist, author Pallavi Aiyar will open the first session, In Search of Stories and Characters, a fitting start for a festival built on the idea that travel often reveals more than it promises.

The line-up continues with Tibetan poet Tenzin Tsundue, journalist and writer Sudeep Chakravarti, photographer Asha Thadani, and biker–traveller Pia Bahadur, whose six-nation road journey has earned her a loyal following.

Also taking part are documentary makers Priya Ganapathy and Anurag Mallick, food writer Karen Anand, and travel vlogger Kritika Goel, each bringing a different way of seeing places and people.

Workshops on writing, photography, and Ayursaukhyam (wellness) will run alongside the main sessions, offering hands-on spaces for reflection and craft.

Yaanam follows the tradition of Kerala Tourism’s earlier initiatives such as the Destination Wedding and MICE Tourism Conclave and the Responsible Tourism Conclave, yet it steps further, towards imagining a sustainable, human-centred mode of travel. One that values quiet over spectacle, care over commerce, and inclusion not as a slogan but as practice.