User:Fredericknoronha/Goa Arts and Literature Festival (GALF)

The Goa Arts and Literature Festival (GALF) is a festival for literature and art organised each year in the month of December at the coastal state of Goa. Its venue is the International Centre, Goa (IGC).

History
This festival was first held in 2010.

Participants
Its participants include writers and artists of Goa, from the North-East and Kashmir, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, and has included themes like Dalit writing, poetry, graphic novels, and translations.

Among its participants were U. R. Ananthamurthy (2010), Gulzar and Amitav Ghosh (2011), Mridula Garg and Eunice de Souza (2012), Meera Kosambi, Mitra Phukan and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (2013), Edwin Thumboo and Wendell Rodricks (2014). Teju Cole, Pakistani novelist Bilal Tanweer, Samanth Subramaniam, French graphic novelist Nicolas Wild, the Bhand Pather theatre troupe directed by M K Raina, Uttar Kamalabari Satra led by Sri Sri Janardhan Deva Goswami, Ranjit Hoskote, Naresh Fernandes, the graphic novelist Amruta Patil, Aditya Adhikari, Mamang Dai,Indian-American rappers Chee Malabar and Himanshu Suri, Pakistani satirical musician Ali Aftab Saeed, American artist  Daisy Rockwell, writers and artists from Australia, Nepal and Singapore, and some locals, including school and college students.

GALF 2014 saw senior journalists discuss "the changing nature of the national media". These included Rajdeep Sardesai, Sagarika Ghose, Sreenivasan Jain, Naresh Fernandes, Samar Halarnkar, Priya Ramani, Govindraj Ethiraj, Sachin Kalbag, Prashant Jha, Cyril Almeida. Then Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar released Sardesai's 2014: The Election that Changed India.

GALF also claims to have "consistently hosted some of the best lineups of contemporary poets ever assembled in contemporary India". In 2013, there was an "unprecedented reunion of the great 'Bombay School' of poets who emerged in the 1970's, including Eunice de Souza, Gieve Patel, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Manohar Shetty."

"Unique, homegrown"
Organisers have called the event "unique, homegrown, volunteer-driven and non-profit ... (which) has rapidly emerged as one of the premier cultural showcases of India." It was "founded to celebrate what is usually considered 'the margins', taking inspiration from `different ways of belonging'," according to its organisers.

2017
In 2017, the festival is scheduled to be held from 7-10 December, Thursday to Sunday.