Events, Residencies & Programmes

01

River of Words

River of Words is one of the newest and most resonant initiatives from the Antonym Council of Global Arts and Literature — a festival built around a single, endlessly generative image: the river. Across multiple days of conversation, performance, and exchange, writers, poets, translators, and thinkers gather to trace what a river can mean when read as language, as memory, as migration, as ecology, as time itself. The festival brings together voices from many literary traditions and language worlds, reflecting Antonym's ongoing work in translation and cross-border literary exchange. Expect panel discussions, book launches, performances, workshops, and exhibitions that move fluidly between disciplines — much like a river moves between banks, gathering new tributaries of thought as it goes.

River of Words 2026 will take place over two days, November 21–22, 2026, continuing a tradition that began in Kolkata as a space where language flows freely across borders, generations, and forms — an invitation for readers and writers everywhere to enter the current.

02

Linewright Residency

This September, Antonym enters new creative territory with the Linewright Residency — a six-day, in-person graphic-narrative residency at Arts Acre, Kolkata, helmed by two of the sharpest minds in Indian comics today: acclaimed graphic novelist Appupen and celebrated curator and scholar Pinaki De. Six to eight handpicked artists will spend an intensive week transforming an Indian micro-story into a fully realized graphic narrative, working under direct mentorship before the collective work is published as an anthology by Antonym Collections. It's a rare, hands-on convergence of mentorship and making — the kind of residency that doesn't just teach craft, but builds it, page by page, into something that will outlive the room it was made in. With applications drawing artists eager to work at this level, Linewright reaffirms Antonym's place at the forefront of visual storytelling in India.

03

Translation Residencies & Workshops

A Legacy of Gathering, Reading, and Reimagining

Over the years, Antonym and ACGAL have brought literature off the page and into shared spaces across Kolkata and beyond. Starting from 2022, every year several translation residencies were conducted to build translation capabilities across multiple literary genres. Antonym has also conducted workshops and residencies to translate from several indigenous languages, namely Rajbangshi and Tenuidie, recently.

Antonym strives to carry the richness and diversity of Indian literature across linguistic borders and into new contexts and readerships. Rooted in the belief that translation is not a secondary act but a creative one in its own right, the residencies bring together translators to work closely on select Indian-language texts, deepening both the craft and the conversation around what it means to move literature between languages.