With an aim to reach out to rural areas across the country, the Sahitya Akademi is looking for literary talents in the rural belts.
Gramalok, the Sahitya Akademi's village outreach programme, helps the Akademi reach out to the rural masses and pool in talent from across the country. As a part of this initiative, the Akademi plans to cover 250 villages in different parts of the country by March 2019.
The focus of the initiative is to bring to the limelight rural litterateurs who often do not get exposure like their urban counterparts to publish their works. The series plans to bridge this gap and promote writers from villages at the district, regional and national levels.
The Akademi will collect stories and poems from rural talents and publish them in different regional languages from next year onwards.
So far, the Sahitya Akademi has covered around 50 villages through the gramalok series. "We are reaching out to the rural population through this programme series. We are covering all states equally in order to pool in talents across different states," said K Sreenivasarao, secretary, Sahitya Akademi.
In gramalok programmes conducted so far, the Akademi has managed to find writers from many villages. The talents include prolific child writers too, who have published stories poems. Young talents will also get the space at the national literary festival and interact with distinguished writers, poets, critics and translators, said Sreenivasarao.
In addition to searching for talent, the Akademi will help people from remote areas of the country get access to good literature in regional and other languages and also inculcate reading habits among children and young adults.
The Akademi intends to cover about 5,000 villages by 2025.