Formed in 2023, the Rachna Books Writers Residency, an initiative by Northeast Journeys and Rachna Books aims to provide an engaging, stimulating and peaceful place for writers to live, write and interact. We nurture new and emerging writing – non-fiction, fiction, graphic novels and comics, and children’s books fiction from the Eastern Himalayan states in India, and connect with writers from the rest of the world.

The residency is located at Rachna, a bookshop and a publishing house in Gangtok, the capital of the Himalayan State of Sikkim in Northeast India. For the first year we partnered with The French Institute in India as part of Villa Swagatam Residency programme. The outcome has been a short graphic novel In the Land of the Lama : Sikkim Stories, Part 1 as a collaboration between the residency, graphic novelist Simon Lamouret and journalist Pema Wangchuk. They are now stepping into the role of curators for the Brahmaputra Literature Festival, the special 2025 edition of which is being hosted at New Delhi World Book Fair as the part of National Book Trust’s Festival of Festivals.

See the complete list of festival organisers here.