We live in a world torn apart by wars and conflicts. While some are engaged in war, others are burdened with the cleaning up duty as the Polish Nobel laureate Szymborska says in her poem ‘The End and the Beginning’: Someone has to push the rubble/to the side of the road, /so the corpse-filled wagons/can pass.

Every passing moment people are being killed in conflicts, blood is being shed, thousands are forced into poverty and tribulations.

Those who lead the wars may have their reasons. From the beginning of the world men had reasons to kill other men. Blood has always been on our hands and on our conscience. We are the cruellest, and the bloodiest of all creatures.

At the moment, across the world, there are multiple active conflicts: in Ukraine, in West Asia, Sudan, Myanmar, and beyond. Millions of people are being killed, displaced, and silenced.

Most often, words fail to heal the wounds inflicted by wars. Yet, words matter. Art matters. That’s why even though we are on a destruction spree, fuelled by greed and lust, art and culture and literature have a moral responsibility to reflect, report and ruminate over the human condition.

Writers from the conflict-rife regions are producing some of the most urgent work of our time, but they are rarely given institutional platforms they deserve. 1 Literature festivals have not onlytheresponsibility but an opportunity to bring together these voices. OALF has always been a space where local stories find global resonance; this year’s theme extends that commitment: how do human beings make meaning out of catastrophe?

The theme for the 11th edition of the Odisha Art & Literature Festival (OALF 2026) is Words & Wounds: Literature, War, and the Human Reckoning. The theme invites writers, artists, scholars, and audiences to examine how literature has borne witness to wars and conflicts across centuries and cultures, and, crucially, how it has helped civilisations reckon, rebuild, and refuse.

No other state in India has the moral standing as Odisha to host such a conversation. The Kalinga War of 261 BCE, fought on this very soil, remains one of history’s most extraordinary intersections of violence and transformation, producing Emperor Ashoka’s famous renunciation and the dissemination of Buddhist thought across Asia. That act of conscience is itself a literary and philosophical event.

It is the context of this year’s OALF.

The theme is designed to be humanist, not political; rooted in testimony and art. It is broad enough to accommodate ancient epics, colonial-era resistance poetry, Holocaust memoir, postcolonial fiction, and contemporary war reportage, while remaining anchored in OALF’s founding spirit of vasudhaivakutumbakam.

Sabin Iqbal
Curator, OALF 2026