Eight voices that illuminate Diwali through pages and stories
The Emirates Literature Foundation curates a reading list for the festive season, drawing from writers who have graced the stage at Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. Each book offers something beyond the traditional: history reframed, families mapped across generations, culinary heritage preserved, and the kind of laughter that belongs to everyone.
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The Emirates Literature Foundation has drawn together eight books that move beyond festive convention, each chosen because its author has stood before audiences at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai. The list belongs to a city as internationally connected as this one deserves: stories that challenge, uncover shared histories, and introduce readers to worlds they may never encounter otherwise.
Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water sweeps across three generations in Kerala, following families and their bond to the land through prose of such substance that Oprah Winfrey called it one of the finest books she has ever read. Sam Dalrymple, a Delhi raised Scottish historian, presents in Shattered Lands the first full account of how the Indian Empire was unmade, drawing on archival research, untranslated private memoirs and interviews conducted across eight languages: English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic and Burmese.
Avni Doshi, based in Dubai, brings her Booker Prize shortlisted precision to The First House, her second novel, which examines the textures of Indian American experience through layers of culture, family and diaspora. Chef Himanshu Saini, who leads Trèsind Studio, the world’s only Indian restaurant to hold three Michelin stars, offers The Rise of Indian Food, released in May 2026, a deeply personal account of childhood in agriculture, culinary training in Delhi, and his move to Dubai, woven through with recipes from five Indian regions.
Vir Das brings memoir as both quest and comedy in The Outsider, a book about belonging that winds through Bollywood and Hollywood with all the necessary chaos. Geetanjali Shree’s Once Elephants Lived Here, published in June 2026, collects short stories that explore invisible boundaries of memory and history through the same playful wordplay and magical realism that won her the International Booker Prize in 2022 as the first Hindi language novel to claim that honour. Banu Mushtaq, another International Booker Prize champion, made history by writing the first Kannada language work and first short story collection to win the award with Heart Lamp.
Imagery courtesy of Emirates Literature Foundation.
