South Asian Literature & Arts Festival 2026 Returns with the Theme of “Global Gaze. South Asian Soul.”

September 26 & 27, 2026 11am – 7 pm

San Francisco Bay Area, California — The South Asian Literature & Arts Festival (SALA), produced by Art Forum SF, returns to Menlo College, Atherton, on 26th and 27th of September 2026 with a timely and thought-provoking theme: Global Gaze. South Asian Soul.

The festival explores what might be called the human tectonic shifts shaping our world—the slow but profound movements of people, ideas and societies that eventually surface as today’s headlines. Migration. Power shifts. Economic displacement. Climate change. Questions of caste, class and gender. Identity. Belonging. Memory. These forces quietly reshape lives and communities long before they become breaking news. At a time when headlines reduce people to statistics, borders and conflicts, SALA invites audiences to discover the human stories beneath the news.

As South Asians living across the world, we are increasingly viewed through narrow lenses—whether as immigrants, technology professionals, economic migrants or geopolitical subjects. Recent debates surrounding immigration have further narrowed that global gaze. Yet the South Asian experience cannot be reduced to visa categories, economic contribution or political discourse. It is a story of extraordinary creativity, scientific discovery, literature, entrepreneurship, philosophy, resilience and cultural imagination that spans continents and generations.

This year’s festival invites audiences to move beyond stereotypes and rediscover the richness and complexity of South Asian voices through literature, art, film, science, history and public conversation.

The News Reports the Storm. 

Literature and Art Reveal the Shifting Ground Beneath It.

Every day, we are confronted with stories of war, migration, political upheaval, economic disruption and social division. News, by its very nature, reports the extraordinary—it tells us what happened, who was affected and what comes next.

But the stories of compassion, resilience, love, sacrifice, creativity and community rarely make the front page.

Those quieter stories—the ones that reveal how people endure hardship, rebuild lives, care for one another and preserve hope—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.

This is why festivals like the South Asian Literature & Arts Festival matter.

By providing a platform to artists, poets, architects, authors and culture-makers, SALA 2026 creates a space where audiences can step beyond the daily news cycle and engage with the lived experiences that shape our world. Through novels, memoirs, poetry, visual art, film and conversation, the festival invites us to understand not only the events defining our time, but the people living through them.

Art, science, and literature do more than inform. They exercise the imagination, expand perspective and build empathy forcing us to inhabit lives unlike our own, challenge assumptions and create deeper understanding across cultures, communities and generations. While headlines often chronicle conflict, division and corporate ambition, literature and the arts illuminate courage, kindness, resilience, humour and the quiet dignity of ordinary lives.

At a time when misinformation, polarization and shrinking attention spans increasingly shape public discourse, festivals like SALA offer something increasingly rare: the opportunity to slow down, listen deeply and engage with ideas that transcend borders.

As Global Gaze. South Asian Soul. suggests, the festival invites audiences to look at South Asia not through the narrow prism of geopolitics or economics, but through the richness of its stories, ideas, imagination and humanity.

The 2026 festival will feature an exceptional lineup of internationally acclaimed writers, thinkers and changemakers, including celebrated animator and author Sanjay Patel; novelists Karan Mahajan, Aatish Taseer, Manil Suri and Amitava Kumar; Nobel Prize-winning scientist Venki Ramakrishnan; Nobel Peace Prize laureate Kailash Satyarthi; renowned artist Salima Hashmi; and iconic author and columnist Shobhaa De, alongside many other distinguished voices from Pakistan, Nepal, and showcasing the Punjabi-Mexican community unique to California.

Audiences will explore literature, visual arts, cinema, science, history, public policy and the evolving South Asian experience in an interconnected world across two days of conversations, performances, and exhibitions.

Now in its seventh year, SALA 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.

Because while the news tells us what happened, literature and art help us understand why it happened—and, perhaps more importantly, how we find compassion, resilience and hope in its aftermath, reminding us that ultimately we are together in our humanity. 

Tickets at www.salafestival.org.

Media Contact

Jena Mehrotra

Press & Media Relations Manager

2drmehrotra@gmail.com
Art Forum SF
South Asian Literature & Arts Festival