IWN Report — Thursday, 17 September 2026
Uttarakhand’s Corbett landscape will host its maiden literary festival this October, arriving at a moment when India’s first national park is grappling with growing visitor numbers and mounting pressure on its forests.
The Corbett Literature Festival runs from 6 to 8 October, with delegates checking in on the 6th and out on the 9th, organised around four themes: wildlife, nature, the Himalayas, and Uttarakhand itself.
Wildlife conservationist and author Prerna Singh Bindra announced her place on the festival’s founding curating team this week, describing it as “the inaugural Corbett Literary Festival.” She joins more than thirty other speakers drawn from conservation, wildlife photography and journalism, among them the journalist and author Gargi Rawat, photographer and environmentalist Anup Sah, conservation photographer Dhritiman Mukherjee, and journalist and wildlife filmmaker Nirmal Ghosh.
‘Loved to Death’
The choice of location carries its own history: the region is home to India’s first national park, established in 1936, and the birthplace of Project Tiger. Today, that legacy is under strain. Annual tourist numbers have doubled since 2019, when researchers were already warning that the landscape risked being “loved to death,” and this July, Corbett Tiger Reserve’s director, Saket Badola, flagged waste management as a growing concern.
Founding Voices
Bindra is a former member of the National Board for Wildlife and a Chevening Fellow. She has written several books on Indian wildlife, including The Vanishing: India’s Wildlife Crisis and the children’s title When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Tiger, and she serves as a trustee of the Hathi Sathi Foundation.
Three Days
The first day, “Stories of Nature,” covers Himalayan perspectives, wildlife photography and folklore. The second, “All Things Wild,” turns to Corbett’s own legacy, urban wildlife coexistence and landscape restoration, including a session titled “The Corbett Legacy: The Land of Roar, Trumpet & Song” with Ghosh, Akshay Shah and the writer Stephen Alter.
Bindra’s session falls on the third day, “People, Places & the Wild,” in a fireside chat titled “The Wild Word: Writing Nature in Fact and Fiction,” again alongside Alter. Other sessions that day include “Leave No Footprint: Ethical and Responsible Tourism” and “Jeevan Daini Himalaya,” on Himalayan ecology.
World of Books
Elsewhere, there’s more for readers of nature and wildlife this week. Nilanjana Roy, writer, editor and columnist, shared the newly announced Crossword Book Awards longlist on X — with not one, not two, but three wildlife-themed books. From war elephants to talking elephants to the secret life of Delhi’s green pockets, the list offers some irresistible reads.
But don’t stop at the animal kingdom — the rest of the list is just as rewarding.
Sources: Corbett Literature Festival · Corbett LitFest 2026 Programme · Prerna Singh Bindra (X) · Heinrich Böll Foundation, “Addressing ‘overtourism’ in the Corbett landscape” · ETV Bharat, International Tiger Day coverage