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News & Reviews
WORD:
Bay Area author Dave Eggers, Kiran Desai to speak at 3rd annual PEN
World Voices
Edited Press Release
PEN American Center announced this year’s theme, "Home and Away," as
well as the program for its third annual PEN World Voices: The New York
Festival of International Literature, which will draw together 162
writers and cultural critics from 45 countries for 67 panels, lectures,
tributes, readings, one-on-one conversations, and musical performances.
America's only festival of international authors, World Voices will
occur April 24 to 29 in various locations around New York City,
including festival venues such as the Bowery Ballroom and the Morgan
Library.
Israeli writer
David Grossman will deliver the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture
on the Festival's closing night, and other participants include Salman
Rushdie, Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer, Dave Eggers, Patricia Melo,
Starbucks selection author Ishmeal Beah, novelist and screenwriter
(Babel) Guillermo Arriaga, Booker Prize-winner Kiran Desai, Neil
Gaiman, Yasmina Khadra, Saadi Youssef, Pulitzer Prize-winner Marilynne
Robinson, Ma Jian, Tatyana Tolstaya, Sam Shepard, and writer/musician
and downtown artist Patti Smith. For a full lineup of this year's
events click here.
The Festival's theme of "Home and Away" explores the insights
literature and writers bring to bear on critical topics in today's
world: local versus larger attachments in a globalizing world, the
conflicting claims of tribe, religion and nation, and the ultimate
issue of planetary survival. "In the United States the charged question
of who can call America home has ignited a national debate on
immigration," said newly appointed Festival Director Caro Llewellyn,
who comes to PEN from the acclaimed Sydney Writers' Festival. "We
wanted to open up the discussion to include broader questions about
what makes a home, and how we define ourselves in relation to it. The
Festival affirms PEN's conviction that writers have an essential
contribution to make to the resolution of such issues and that our
national conversation can and must be enriched by a more diverse and
international range of voices."
Taking "home" in its broadest possible sense, the Festival opens with a
major event at Cooper Union's Great Hall bringing the writer's
distinctive focus to the crisis facing the planet itself. Destruction
of the Earth's natural systems touches each of us across boundaries of
nationality, economics, religion, ethnicity, and language. On the
evening of Tuesday, April 24, Homero Aridjis, Billy Collins, Jonathan
Franzen, Moses Isegawa, Pico Iyer, Laura Restrepo, Marilynne Robinson,
Roxana Robinson, Salman Rushdie, and Colson Whitehead will each read
impassioned and illuminating pieces on the subject of the natural world.
Programs around the city will consider the theme of "Home and Away"
from a variety of perspectives. The Festival also features several
large-scale ensemble events, comprising writers from a number of
nations and backgrounds. Among this year's highlights: "Town Hall
Readings: Writing Home," where Don DeLillo, Nobel Prize-winner Nadine
Gordimer, Steve Martin, and Salman Rushdie join other U.S. and
international voices to explore the idea of home (Wednesday, April 25);
"An Evening with The Moth," where one of the city's hippest literary
series takes on the festival theme through storytelling by authors such
as Neil Gaiman and Pico Iyer, with humorist John Hodgman as the M.C.
(Thursday, April 26); "A Believer Nighttime Event," featuring a
performance by Miranda July and a "Writer Speed Date Session" with four
World Voices authors (Saturday, April 28); "The PEN Cabaret," bringing
together musician and poet Patti Smith, playwright Sam Shepard, poet
Saul Williams and other special guests at the Bowery Ballroom
(Saturday, April 28).
Numerous one-on-one conversations throughout the Festival week will
pair authors in intimate discussion of their craft. Among these
programs are Neil Gaiman with Ivory Coast graphic novelist Marguerite
Abouet, Norway's award-winning writer Per Petterson and Pulitzer Prize
winner Marilynne Robinson, Babel screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and
Paul Auster, Dave Eggers and the subject of his new novel, Valentino
Achak Deng, Kiran Desai and Vikram Chandra, and Tatyana Tolstaya and
David Remnick. Events on Sunday, April 29, at the New York Public
Library include a tribute to the late Polish writer and journalist
Ryszard Kapuscinski, a panel about sex and eroticism in today's
literature, and an event examining the temptations and responsibilities
of travel writing featuring British author/philosopher Alain de Botton.
Among other Festival programs taking place: a series of events for
young people, featuring writers with unexpected takes on childhood
themes and experiences, such as Ishmael Beah, Neil Gaiman, Uzodinma
Iweala, and Markus Zusak; programs on prison writing, including an
evening hosted by director and producer Sydney Pollack (Thursday, April
26); a panel examining the cultural forces that have shifted the focus
of Latin American writing from Magic to "Gritty Realism" (Friday, April
27); a discussion moderated by Alice Sebold about the rise of
Mediterranean noir (Friday, April 27); and several events about what's
lost and gained in the translation from literature to both drama and
film (and vice versa).
The Festival's closing event on Sunday, April 29-the second annual
Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture (last year's speaker was Nobel
Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk)-will feature Israeli writer David Grossman.
The author of over a dozen widely translated works of fiction,
non-fiction, and children's literature and winner of numerous
international awards, Grossman has been an active supporter of
Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations and critic of Israeli
settlements on the West Bank. Shortly after he joined public calls for
a cease-fire in the recent Lebanese war, Grossman's son was killed
while serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. Following the lecture,
there will be an on-stage conversation between Grossman and Nobel
Prize-winning South African author Nadine Gordimer.
"We asked David Grossman to deliver this year's lecture because he
exemplifies Arthur Miller's belief in the unique power of literature to
enable the moral imagination," said Festival Chair Salman Rushdie.
"Both in his work-and by his personal example-he has insisted upon the
responsibility of the writer to assist his community in reaching for a
broad, humane and compassionate conception of citizenship. We are
honored that Mr. Grossman will share his insights with us this year."
Founded in 1921, PEN is the world's oldest literary and the oldest
ongoing human rights organization. Its mission remains the advancement
of literature, the defense of free expression, and the promotion of
international literary fellowship. PEN American Center was founded in
1922 and is the largest and most active of the 141 chapters
constituting International PEN. Its 3,100 distinguished members carry
on the achievements in literature and the advancement of human rights
of such past members as W. H. Auden, James Baldwin, Willa Cather,
Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Thomas Mann, Arthur
Miller, Marianne Moore, Eugene O'Neill, Susan Sontag, and John
Steinbeck. To learn more about the PEN American Center, please visit
its website.
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