After the July 2016 Dhaka attack, the festival suffered 19 international cancellations. Despite that, the organizers held the festival to show that Bangladesh could still hold an international cultural festival in the face of terrorism. Casey Quackenbush wrote that, "Bangladesh, where independent bloggers and journalists have increasingly become targets of violence, the Dhaka Literary Festival has become a symbol of defiance." That year, the headline author was the Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul.