Each year the PEN World Voices Festival strives to foster international understanding and promote literary culture by bringing more than fifty authors of distinction and promise from around the world together with a stellar list of their U.S. counterparts for six days of conversations, readings, performances—and, of course, the famous PEN Cabaret.
Many of this year’s writers are the leading literary lights in their own countries—and not nearly well-known enough on our shores. The Festival is a rare opportunity for American readers and writers to meet and converse with the present and future faces of international literature.
This year, PEN celebrates the 50th anniversary of its campaigns on behalf of persecuted writers. For five decades PEN has been instrumental in freeing hundreds of writers imprisoned for their words, and today PEN continues to fight for writers around the globe. To highlight this ongoing work—and as a reminder that the silencing of writers in one country robs the entire world of their voices—there will be an empty chair onstage at each of this year’s Festival programs, dedicated to one of our colleagues currently in prison somewhere in the world.
Knausgaard Events:
An Around the World: Thursday 29th April kl 7 - 8.30 pm at Joe's Pub
Grab your passport and come on an around the world trip with Festival airlines. We’ll be making numerous stops in Europe, then head to Australia, Quebec, and South Africa before we land back in the U.S. Please fasten your seatbelts, sit back and relax, even grab a delicious Joe’s Pub cocktail, while you enjoy a very special evening of fiction and non-fiction readings by award-winning writers from here and abroad.
Tickets: $15/$10 PEN & ACLU members. www.joespub.com or 212.967.7555. Purchase tickets for both Joe’s Pub events tonight for $20/$15 PEN members
Cosponsored by Joe’s Pub
425 Lafayette Street
Participants: Preston Allen,
Javier Cercas, Siri Hustvedt,
Karl O. Knausgaard, Anne
Landsman, Monique Proulx,
Lee Stringer, Christos Tsiolkas,
and Tommy Wieringa
Heaven and Earth: Friday 30th April 4.30 - 6 pm at the Austrian Cultural Forum.
Writers have any number of tools up their sleeve - structure, genre, and language are among some of the many devices they can call upon. Whether to swoop through the celestial heavens on the rhythms of lyrical language, or move through terra firma with accurate hard-hitting depictions, is a decision writers make before they even put pen to paper. Norwegian novelist Karl Knausgaard whose latest book is all about myths and angels, and Quebec writer Monique Proulx who uses nature as a character in her most recent novel, are joined by Roman Senchin from Russia, who deals with the streets in his work and Dutch journalist, Joris Luyendijk, who adds some heavy doses of realism from the world of reportage. They’ll be guided to heaven and back to earth by executive director of the Center for Fiction, Noreen Tomassi.
Free and open to the public. However reservations are required.
Please call ACF’s reservation line at 212.319.5300 ext. 222
or email reservations@acfny.org.
Cosponsored by the Austrian Cultural Forum
Austrian Cultural Forum,
11 East 52nd Street
Participants: Karl O.
Knausgaard, Joris Luyendijk,
Monique Proulx, and
Roman Senchin
Moderated by Noreen Tomassi
About:
Karl O. Knausgaard (Norway) made his debut with the novel Ute Av Verden (Out of the World). A Time for Everything, his second novel and his first to be published in English, was nominated for the Nordic Council Prize. The first volume of his celebrated sixvolume Min Kamp (My Struggle) received Norway’s prestigious Brage Prize in 2009.