The Goa Book Festival 2026 will be organised by the National Book Trust (NBT) in Panaji from February 4. Director, Yuvraj Malik interacts with NT BUZZ on the grand event and NBT’s efforts to boost the reading habit
RAMNATH N. PAI RAIKAR
American novelist and short-story writer, George R. R. Martin had said that “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” Books have always been personal friends of the reader, staying in his company as long as he reads them, before going back to the book shelf or the book case.
The National Book Trust, India (NBT), an apex autonomous body established in 1957, promotes reading habits and produces quality literature in multiple Indian languages as also English, at affordable prices. It will organise the Goa Book Festival 2026 at the Bandodkar Ground, Campal, in collaboration with the Lokmanya Cultural Foundation, Samarth Yuva Foundation and the government of Goa, from February 4 to 8.
Director of NBT, Yuvraj Malik feels that the forthcoming book fair will make the state one of country’s leading literary destinations, especially as Goa has its own fragrance of activities.
Speaking further, Malik says that this exhibition could be a permanent annual feature for Goa. “We will of course evaluate the Goa Book Festival 2026 once it is over and as per the response, will decide about its feature in the state,” he adds.
Malik, who is also the CEO of all the book fairs organised by the NBT across the country states that the Trust cannot hold book fair in every place, all over the states and hence utilises its book vans to take books in such places. “We will be also outreaching all villages in Goa through a dedicated book van called Books on Wheels,” he says, informing that the NBT is also making available its books to schools at a
discounted rate.
Dismissing the fallacy that printed books have become unpopular in modern times, with the advent of e-reader facilities like Kindle, which allow users to buy, download, and read e-books, magazines and audiobooks, the NBP director says that printed books are still sold in large numbers.
“The NBT publishes 2,000 new titles annually and prints five to six crore books every year. I have in fact noticed that the response to books and literary festivals has been encouraging both in terms of readership as also sale of books which has risen substantially after the COVID-19 pandemic. We were surprised to see that the Gen Z is also actively attending book fairs and book festivals, and buying books. The only challenge is how to package our books for marketing. If the content of the book is good then there is no problem in its sale. There has been no decline in the sale of the NBT books, during the last five years,” he adds.
Speaking about the local content published by the NBT, Malik says that the Trust had stopped publishing Konkani content over last few years. “We however have restarted the same and are now translating Konkani children’s literature,” he says.
The NBT holds more than 1,000 events around the country including book festivals, which are organised from Ladakh to Ujjain and Dehradun to Ahmedabad, all aiming to strengthen the reading movement and offering a rich blend of knowledge, inspiration and entertainment for readers, teachers and students.
