PEN World Voices Festival

I’ve been going to the PEN World Voices Festival in New York for several years, and blogged about it quite a lot last year. But despite the scale of the event (160 writers this year, from 41 countries) I’m surprised how many serious readers and writers haven’t heard about it.

So this is to let you know that this year’s PEN World Voices Festival is taking place from April 27 to May 3. The full program is available online and many of the events are free.

I’ll be covering some of the festival for the Words Without Borders blog, although this year’s schedule doesn’t include much African literature in translation, which is my usual beat for WWB. Here are some of the events that look intriguing to me:

Cod, Orange Groves, and Olives with Mark Kurlansky (free)
The Work of Andrey Platonov with Michael Ondaajte et al. (free)
Kafka in America with Louis Begley, Colm Toibin, et al. (free)
Tribute to Harold Pinter (free)
Mark Z. Danielewski and Rick Moody ($10)
Krik? Krak! (Haitian storytelling, free)
Is Nonfiction Literature? with Philip Gourevitch, Colum McCann, et al. ($15)