Ubud Writers & Readers Festival

As we head into Bali's version of 'springtime', we’re looking ahead to the thirteenth Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. We hope you’ve highlighted this year’s Festival dates – October 26–30 – in your diary already! Part of what we love about putting the Festival together every year is discovering the most exciting voices from around the world to bring to the Ubud stage. In the past weeks our pile of ‘must reads’ has grown – with shortlist announcements from the Man Booker International Prize and the Best Translated Book Awards. Festival favourite Eka Kurniawan made the longlist for both prizes (congrats, Eka!), and recently took out the inaugural World Readers’ Award for Beauty is a Wound. If you missed Eka at last year’s Festival, catch up on his session in our #Afterword podcast series. As well as being up to our elbows in new reads, our esteemed curatorial panel has been reading through the record 894 entries for the UWRF Emerging Indonesian Writers Anthology, set to be launched at this year's Festival in collaboration with Bitread. With submissions from primary-school-aged writers right through to university scholars, we're excited to share that students made up 41.5% of entries – a clear indication of the passionate future of Indonesian literature. We'd love to keep you up-to-date on all the UWRF news, and invite you to join the conversation – find us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Until next time,