The Making of a Literary Festival

The role of the current curatorial team is to make sure that GTLF remains relevant and speaks to the needs of our literary community.

Photo by Dario Fernandez Ruz

In late 2019, I received a text message from Pauline Fan, the director of the George Town Literary Festival (GTLF). She had just concluded the 9th edition of Malaysia’s largest literary festival held in Penang. Pauline and I have known each other for several years mainly through our essays and translations. Her earliest work of translation that I read was her Malay translation of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s classic text Was ist Aufklarung. She most recently published Luka Kenangan, translations of selected poems by a Romanian-born German-language poet, Paul Celan. In her message, Pauline asked me to help her to curate the festival, with a focus on expanding the Malay language programme. Previously, I had been involved in GTLF as a moderator, but I knew that curation was a different matter altogether. I was hesitant at first to take up her invitation, but after some persuasion, I accepted. For the next three years, from 2020-2022, I was part of the curatorial team for GTLF.

I met Pauline again in KL recently and we had a discussion on this year’s curatorial direction for GTLF. Pauline is now busy curating the 13th edition of GTLF. This year, she is accompanied by festival curator, Adriana Nordin Manan, and two guest curators, M. Navin and Florence Kuek. The curatorial team is supported, as always, by the festival producers, PCEB. GTLF has been an important vessel for Pauline’s literary vision—connecting local and international writers, introducing new works, catalysing important conversations within the Malaysian literary scene, and on literature in translation. As I came in as a curator during the Covid-19 pandemic, many questions arose at the time about the relevance of literary festivals in the world. Now we sat down to reminisce about our three-year journey and experience of making GTLF both during the pandemic and post-pandemic.

The pandemic years brought a sense of hopelessness—literary festivals seemed doomed as cross-border travel was restricted. Across the world, literary festivals were faced with an existential crisis, throwing into sharp relief questions of relevance, survival, and ways of adapting. However, some literary festivals decided to turn to digital platforms, opening possibilities of reaching new audiences. Some even drew higher numbers of literary enthusiasts online than they had in physical form. The Hay Festival—known as one of the “big three” literary festivals alongside Edinburgh and Cheltenham—doubled their number of visitors online compared to their pre-pandemic edition in 2019. Soon after the reopening, literary festivals re-emerged from the impact, and began rethinking what it means to be a literary festival, reconfiguring ways of making a comeback in society.

*This is an excerpt. Read the full article in Penang Monthly, August 2023 issue (Free with registration).