The Lahore Literary Festival is the city’s premier free-to-public cultural event.
LLF explores the dialogue and interface between literature and the arts that shape our cultural, social, economic, and political frameworks.
The Festival aims to bring together, discuss, and celebrate the diverse and pluralistic literary traditions of Lahore—a city of the arts, activism, and big ideas.
Lahore’s cultural significance and influence have been longstanding. A global city under the 12th century Sultanate, capital of the Mughal Empire under Akbar, cradle of the modern Punjabi civilization under Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Lahore has fired the imagination of artists for centuries, inspiring global literature and thought from Milton’s Paradise Lost to Kipling’s Kim to Massenet’s Opera Le Roi de Lahore to John Masters’ Bhowani Junction.
Lahore’s preeminence in giving birth to new ideas, poetry and prose, manifestos and movements, makes it a vital node for Pakistani culture and a befitting site for a literary festival.
LLF features discussions on a variety of subjects—fiction and nonfiction writing, music, painting, filmmaking, architecture, politics—to reclaim and employ Lahore’s rich and varied literary traditions.
LLF was founded by Razi Ahmed in 2012.
