GTLF: Where Literature becomes Activism

By OOI KEE BENG (GTLF Festival Director, Penang Monthly Managing Editor, and Penang Institute Executive Director)

In Mekong Review, August 2026

MOST FESTIVALS are like birthdays. They puncture the relentless monotony of daily life. Like new year days, harvest or spring festivals, and religious events. In that sense, they are also celebratory. Like parties

But beyond that, there are calendar events that are forward looking, marking hope and optimism. Inaugurations, by definition, are such, as are graduations. The Americans call the celebration of a graduation a “commencement”. That is most appropriate. It marks a beginning for the young finishing their schooling.

The little city of Penang in Malaysia is known for its many festivals, not to mention the many public holidays the country celebrates every year. Those many holidays are exhibitions of mutual respect between the many ethnic groups, the many religions, and the many states and sultanates that comprise the country. That is part and parcel of nation building, one supposes.

But then there is a festival in Penang that has a strong activist element to it. It has a clear agenda. It seeks to promote love of literature. In fact, it considers mastery of language, of reading and writing, and of contemplation as the essence of individual development.

This is the George Town Literary Festival (GTLF). Unlike most festivals, this one is owned and curated by Penang’s renowned think tank, Penang Institute.

The rationale behind the Institute’s decision to adopt the festival as one of its key annual events is the belief that nation-building concerns in a new country like Malaysia tend to ignore the importance of the humanities in favour of education and skills that can provide good-paying jobs. No doubt the latter is important, but when done at the cost of individual intellectual development, the long-term consequences provide for shallow discourses in human interactions and contemplations.

Realising that the demands of modern life makes contemplation, curiosity and meditation difficult, and convinced that profound meanings become available to those who love and master the use of language, who appreciate how expressive, poetic and evocative any language can be, and that social interactions become stronger through healthy conversations, Penang Institute sees the GTLF as an effective vehicle with which to promote literariness.

Discovering the joys of literariness, of proactive thought, of intelledtual interactions, according to ancient Chinese thought, is civilization itself. That is why, before the advent of “Science and Technology” as a clearly defined subject, the humanities was the basis for most human knowledge.

While Science and Technology has given us much, it has also taken away much. Much that is human heritage has become alien to human consciousness, and to society’s integrity. Speed of change is not conducive to self-knowledge and self-appreciation.

Humanity is a species that loves to hear stories. Narratives, discourses, tales, biographies, even conspiracies—these define us. And they offer meaning; true or false is not even the point. A good story provides fodder for thought, for human interactions, for further contemplation. That resource is valuable, and that is what makes us humans.

That is what Artificial Intelligence cannot take from us. Face-to-face conversations. The love affair between author and reader. The imagining of meaningful non-realities. The emotive transfer of insights. Epiphanies and poetic novelties.

With the invention of paper and of printing, our minds expanded, and our ability to convey and generate knowledge and ideas multiplied a thousand-fold. The epistemic evolution that humans have experienced over the last few millennia did always come at a price at every stage. When it happens at great speed, as has been the case in the last couple of decades, what gets lost may not even be properly identified, and therefore unmitigated or remedied.

Every thinking person’s job in the 21^st century should be to recognize, identify and remedy what humanity continues to lose by moving at a speed dictated by machines and money.

Information technology, by its nature, is global. This naturally overwhelms the local, the immediate and the personal.

The GTLF celebrates these things. We promote authors who are fringe, who are local (in the sense of writing about the small, the fleeting, and the imaginary) but touch on things generally human, and who wish to communicate to a live audience.

The themes chosen over the last three years offer some insight into the train of thought and the type of activism promoted by Penang Institute as curator for the GTLF. In 2024, we told the people of George Town that the festival was as much their festival as anybody else’s. We focused on “Word on the Street”. With that, we meant to say that everybody has tales to tell, and that we are surrounded by a legacy of words chosen for particular and personal reasons. They are the scrabble—the scrabbling—of our city.

The following year, we went one step further and wanted city people to realise that the institutions and associations in George Town all have written sources hidden away in their cupboards and cellars which are valuable to historical research. The minutes of their board meetings can bare tales in the eager hands of a literarily gifted storyteller. The theme that year was “Urban Myths and Memories”. We wished to validate the back lanes, the dungeons, the dusty cabinets.

In 2026, the chosen theme is “Cosmopolises”. Again, we continue our deconstructive journey to showcase Difference rather than Similarities. A cosmopolis is by definition a place where cultural differences and economic endeavours meet and interact. What we now wish to highlight is that such places are not repeats of each other. There are cosmopolises and there are cosmopolises. A cosmopolis is a cosmopolis in its own way. Furthermore, there is no clear line across which a city becomes a cosmopolis, and not just a bland homogenous population.

Most importantly, a cosmopolis also suggests a limit to political control. For order to persist in a cosmopolis, rules—and social attitudes—need to be tentative and adaptive.

What one could say is that the George Town Literary Festival is Penang’s gift to those who seek personal expression, social celebration, and a meaningful future. It is a place for rediscovery of self, and discovery of other minds. No pressure, just be human.