Fourteenth Edition
METAPHOR LUCKNOW LITFEST
METAPHOR LUCKNOW LITFEST IS A TRIBUTE TO THE CULTURAL AND LITERARY LEGACY OF LUCKNOW. THE FIRST EVER LITFEST TO TAKE PLACE IN LUCKNOW, IT WAS ESTABLISHED IN 2013 WITH AN AIM TO BROADEN CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT IN THE CULTURAL SPHERE.
Lucknow
What happens here
A festival shaped by the city it calls home.
Metaphor was founded in Lucknow and continues to be made here.
On its stages, literature sits beside cinema, poetry beside public life. Established voices share the programme with young writers. Conversations move naturally across Hindi, Urdu and English, because the language of an idea has never been more important than the idea itself.
What began in 2013 has grown into a continuing conversation between the city and the people who come to speak in it.
Why this city
Lucknow has always made room for conversation.
Long before literature festivals became part of the cultural calendar, Lucknow had its own traditions of gathering around words. Poetry was heard as much as it was read. Newspapers and publishing houses carried arguments beyond the room in which they began. Language belonged to public life.
Metaphor comes from that history.
The festival does not try to recreate an older Lucknow. It asks what the city's instinct for language, exchange and attentive listening can mean now.
From the Metaphor Archive
Conversations that stayed with us.
Some conversations end when the session does. Others find their way into another room, another argument or another way of looking at something familiar.
Return to a few from the Metaphor stage.
Stage & Screen · Official Broadcasts
Watch the conversations on YouTube.
Full panel discussions, keynote dialogues, poetry recitals and debates recorded live across thirteen editions of Metaphor Lucknow Litfest.
