The Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2025 runs October 29 through November 2 in Bali, Indonesia. This 22nd edition of the festival features a pair of Booker Prize winners, chroniclers of Indonesia’s past and dozens of writers, artists, thinkers and performers from the archipelago’s present amid their counterparts from six continents.
The 2025 and 2024 International Booker Prize winners Banu Mushtaq from Indian and Jenny Erpenbeck from Germany will appear together to discuss their works and their triumphs. A lawyer and women’s rights activist, Mushtaq was awarded her 2025 Booker for short story collection Heart Lamp. She writes in Kannada, the official language of Karnataka in southwest India, and will appear with the book’s translator Deepa Bhasthi. Erpenbeck’s winning novel Kairos is a romance set amid the collapse of the East German state.
Keynote speaker David Van Reybrouck wrote Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World, a history of Indonesia’s emergence as a nation in this 80th anniversary year of its declaration of independence. Award winning historian William Dalrymple chronicles Britain’s colonial East India Company in The Anarchy and highlights connections between Indonesia and the subcontinent, where he makes his home.
Novelist and essayist Pico Iyer returns to Bali for the first time since 2007. Author most recently of Aflame: Learning from Silence, Iyer welcomes the festival as an opportunity to “gather to forge a fresh set of possibility. At a time when our world seems more divided than ever, nothing could be more urgent or uplifting.”
“From humble beginnings, the festival has grown into Southeast Asiaʼs most meaningful literary event, bringing people together from near and far,” festival founder and director Janet DeNeefe says. “So, if you wish to meet fellow literary-minded folk, love a good story or performance, or are simply eager to learn more about Indonesia, then come to Ubud to experience the magic for which we are famous.
“For me, our festival has been life-changing, and it can be for you.”
Former US diplomat and broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen is Asia editor at large for Clarion Media, a longtime contributor to Forbes, columnist for Asia Times and author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set in his adopted hometown during the 1997 handover about TV news, love, betrayal, high finance, and cheap lingerie. See his biography, online archive and more at www.muhammadcohen.com; follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, ex-Twitter @MuhammadCohen and now on Blue Sky @MuhammadCohen.bsky.social.