Photography courtesy of Penang Global Tourism.
Organising a literary festival is no easy task, especially when you’ve only got five months to do it. But passion and determination drove one man and his team to pull it off – and very successfully.
Umapagan Ampikaipakan is no stranger to organising festivals. Having directed Cooler Lumpur – South-East Asia’s first festival of ideas – for the past two years, he recently curated the fourth George Town Literary Festival (GTLF) held in November this year. Over the three-day festival, literary greats and fledgling writers from both home and abroad delivered talks and workshops, stirring up conversations that were profound, penetrating and often also light-hearted. But perhaps what’s more important, the festival reached out to the public about how literature is accessible and how it is not something confined to musty thick libraries or coffee-infused hipster spaces. Anyone can enjoy literature.
And according to Umapagan, who is more popularly known as Uma, the festival is not only for people who read, but also for those who don’t but are interested in the conversations that take place about books and reading. Penang Monthly meets up with him post-GTLF for a chat, during which he reveals the goings-on behind curating the festival and, of course, his love of Penang food.
