Spring is the season for festivals. People emerge from their winter hibernation to rejoice in film, song, dance, and—thanks to the PEN World Voices Festival—literature.
The PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature kicked off this Monday, April 27th, and will run until Sunday, May 3rd. During this one week, over 60 events featuring writers from places as exotic as Sri Lanka and as familiar as the Upper West Side will be speaking, reading, and discussing everything from poetry to economics in literature. This year’s participants include Laurie Anderson, Paul Auster, Neil Gaiman, Paul Krugman, Walter Mosley, Richard North Patterson, Salman Rushdie, George Soros, and Colm Tóibín.
The PEN World Voices Festival is more than just a celebration of literature. “Really it was about breaking down some of the insularity and cultural misunderstandings and the idea was to bring writers from all over the world to be in discussion,” director Caro Llewellyn said. Thus, the festival’s emphasis is, as its name suggests, on the international literary community. “We bring voices from all over the globe and try to encourage people to read other cultures and other languages,” Llewellyn added.
Many of the events are conducted in multiple languages, allowing authors to speak in their native tongues, with translators to relay the work to the audience in English. There are also numerous discussions about translation and literature in a global and politically conscious context.
“The festival was created when Sir Salman Rushdie was the president of PEN and as a response to 9/11 and the sort of shutting down of America, the ‘us and them’ of America,” Llewellyn said. “He thought it would be a good thing to start a program with writers around the world, and he thought writers could break down the barriers that went up very quickly.”
And with representatives from around the world engaged in dialogue on issues of culture, media, literature, and economics, the festival has certainly achieved its goal of cross-cultural communication.
Each year, the festival has a theme to help foster the discussion and interplay between the events. The theme of this year’s festival is Evolution/Revolution. As the members of PEN observed, 2009 is the anniversary of such revolutionary events as the fall of the Berlin Wall and evolutionary events as Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species, and they thought the coincidence was worth celebrating.
Some of the stand-out events from the star-studded affair include “Readings from Around the Globe” with Bernardo Atxaga, Petina Gappah, Mariken Jongman, Michael Ondaatje, Daniel Sada, Hwang Sok-yong, and Colm Tóibín on Friday at 7:30 at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, and the PEN Cabaret on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the French Institute Alliance Française (22 E. 60th St.).
“We are offering an incredible feast for people who love reading, writing, and all those things,” Llewellyn said.
The PEN World Voices Festival is running through Sunday, May 3rd. Check the PEN Web site, pen.org/worldvoices, for a full schedule of events.
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