The South Asian Literature and Art Festival – the largest event of its kind in the US, returns to the Bay Area on 26 & 27 September. The pathbreaking, multi-disciplinary event produced by Art Forum SF will be held at Menlo College in Atherton, CA, from 11am to 7 pm.

Now in its seventh year, SALA 2026 has grown into one of North America’s leading celebrations of South Asian literature and the arts, bringing together Nobel laureates, award-winning authors, filmmakers, artists, scholars, and thousands of attendees from across the Bay Area and beyond.

This year’s thought-provoking theme: Global Gaze. South Asian Soul explores the human tectonic shifts shaping our world—the slow but profound movements of people, ideas, and societies that eventually surface as today’s headlines. News, by its very nature, reports the extraordinary—stories of war, migration, political upheaval, economic disruption, and social division—forces that quietly reshape lives and communities long before they become breaking news. But the underlying stories of compassion, resilience, love, sacrifice, creativity, and community rarely make the front page. 

At a time when headlines reduce people to statistics, borders and conflicts,  SALA 2026 invites audiences to move beyond stereotypes and discover the human stories beneath the news.

These quieter stories reveal how people endure hardships, rebuild lives, care for one another, and preserve hope; they are most often found in literature and the arts. They provide the emotional,  cultural, and historical context that headlines simply cannot. Behind every immigration statistic is a family.  Behind every conflict is memory. Behind every economic shift are lives transformed. Behind every social movement are ordinary people navigating extraordinary circumstances.

SALA 2026 will highlight stories of extraordinary creativity, scientific discovery, literature, entrepreneurship, philosophy, resilience, and cultural imagination that spans continents and generations.

“We examine and celebrate different points of view but also recognize that ultimately, we
are all alike and borders are fluid like our thoughts. We aim to provide a platform that
will spark an enlightened, erudite, and immersive engagement,” say SALA organizers.

The festival will feature contemporary local, national, and international authors and
artists speaking in keynotes, on panels, and in stage presentations spanning many
topics and literary forms. Attendees will experience a fair-like atmosphere featuring independent bookstores and publishers, literary nonprofits, writing programs, open-mic poetry readings, outdoor performances, food stalls, and other related exhibitors.

This year’s exceptional lineup of internationally acclaimed writers, thinkers and  changemakers, include Nobel Prize-winning scientist Venki Ramakrishnan; Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi; renowned artist Salima Hashmi; celebrated animator and author Sanjay  Patel; novelists Karan Mahajan, Aatish Taseer, Manil Suri, Amitava Kumar and the multiple award winning author, Lakshmi Puri. 

It includes writers Kausar Munir, Devi Laskar, Shobhaa De, Madhushree Ghosh, filmmakers Kanishka Aggarwal and Kajri Akhtar, alongside many other distinguished voices from Pakistan, Nepal,  and showcasing the Punjabi-Mexican community unique to California. 

SALA partners also include Stanford University, Asia Society, AAWW (Asia American Writers Workshop), UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, India Currents, Off the Cuff, India Post ( media sponsor for the Indian Community), and nonprofit organizations representing the South Asian diaspora.

Tickets at www.salafestival.org.