PEN World Voices: The New York Festival of International Literature was launched in 2005. PEN World Voices is a week-long literary festival in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. The Festival was founded by Esther Allen and Michael Roberts under then PEN President Salman Rushdie. The Festival was composed of programs, readings, conversations, and debates that showcase international literature and new writers. The Festival is produced by PEN American Center

PEN American Center

PEN American Center , founded in 1922 and based in New York City, works to advance literature, to defend free expression, and to foster international literary fellowship. The Center has a membership of 3,300 writers, editors, and translators...

, a nonprofit organization

Nonprofit organization

Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...

 that works to advance literature, promote free expression, and foster international literary fellowship.

World Voices 2005

The inaugural World Voices Festival was held in New York City from April 18 to April 25, 2005. Participating authors came from 45 different countries. Participants included: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer.Her family is of Igbo descent. In 2008 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.-Early life and education:...

, Jonathan Ames

Jonathan Ames

Jonathan Ames is an American author who has written a number of novels and comic memoirs. He was a columnist for the New York Press for several years, and became known for self-deprecating tales of his sexual misadventures. He also has a long-time envy of boxing, appearing occasionally in the ring...

, Paul Auster

Paul Auster

Paul Benjamin Auster is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy , Moon Palace , The Music of Chance , The Book of Illusions and The Brooklyn Follies...

, Breyten Breytenbach

Breyten Breytenbach

Breyten Breytenbach is a South African writer and painter with French citizenship.-Biography:Breyten Breytenbach was born in Bonnievale, Western Cape, approximately 180 km from Cape Town and 100 km from the southernmost tip of Africa at Cape Agulhas...

, Nuruddin Farah

Nuruddin Farah

Nuruddin Farah is a prominent Somali novelist.-Early years:Born in Baidoa, Somalia, Farah is the son of a merchant father and a poet mother. As a child, he attended school at Kallafo in the Ogaden, and studied English, Arabic, and Amharic. In 1963, three years after Somalia's independence, Farah...

, Gish Jen

Gish Jen

Gish Jen is a contemporary American writer.-Background:...

, Ryszard Kapuściński

Ryszard Kapuscinski

Ryszard Kapuściński was a Polish journalist and writer whose dispatches in book form brought him a global reputation. Also a photographer and poet, he was born in Pińsknow in Belarusin the Kresy Wschodnie or eastern borderlands of the second Polish Republic, into poverty: he would say later that...

, Khaled Mattawa

Khaled Mattawa

Khaled Mattawa is a Libyan poet, and a renowned Arab-American writer, he is also a leading literary translator, focusing on translating Arabic poetry into English...

, Dunya Mikhail

Dunya Mikhail

Dunya Mikhail is an ethnic Chaldean United States-based poet who was born in Iraq. Mikhail worked as Literary Editor for The Baghdad Observer. Facing increasing threats and harassment from the Iraqi authorities for her writings, she fled Iraq in the late 1990s and studied Near Eastern Studies at...

, Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi, born ca. 1947, is an Iranian academic and bestselling writer who has resided in the United States since 1997 when she emigrated from Iran. Her field is English language literature....

, Elif Shafak, Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka

Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Soyinka is a Nigerian writer, poet and playwright. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, where he was recognised as a man "who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence", and became the first African in Africa and...

, Ali Bader

Ali Bader

Ali Bader is an award winning Arabic novelist And a Film producer, author of eleven works of fiction, and several works of non-fiction, he has also worked as war correspondent covering the Middle East. He rose to prominence in the Arab world in the last decade. In addition to his work as an...

 and Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is a Kenyan author, formerly working in English and now working in Gĩkũyũ. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature...

.

Selected 2005 Programs

• Conversation: Chico Buarque and Paul Auster
• Confronting the Worst: Writing and Catastrophe
• Don Quixote at 400: A Tribute
• Crossing Borders: Universal Themes in Children's Literature
• Literature and Power
• International Noir
• The Power of the Pen: Does Writing Change Anything?
• Writers and Iraq
• Africa and the World: The Writer’s Role
• Conversation: Hanan al-Shaykh and Salman Rushdie
• A Believer Magazine Nighttime Event
• The Post-National Writer
• The Way We Love Now
• Voices from the New Europe
• Czesław Miłosz and the Conscience of Literature

PEN American Center offers audio downloads and photos from select events on their web site. Issue 7 of the PEN American Center literary journal also published selections from the 2005 programs http://www.pen.org/journal.

World Voices 2006

The second World Voices Festival was held in New York City from April 26 to April 30, 2006. The Festival theme was Faith

Faith

Faith is confidence or trust in a person or thing, or a belief that is not based on proof. In religion, faith is a belief in a transcendent reality, a religious teacher, a set of teachings or a Supreme Being. Generally speaking, it is offered as a means by which the truth of the proposition,...

 & Reason

Reason

Reason is a term that refers to the capacity human beings have to make sense of things, to establish and verify facts, and to change or justify practices, institutions, and beliefs. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, language, ...

. The Festival featured 137 writers from 41 countries in 57 programs. International participants included: Martin Amis

Martin Amis

Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...

, Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Eleanor Atwood, is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C...

, Gioconda Belli

Gioconda Belli

Gioconda Belli is an author, novelist and renowned Nicaraguan poet.-Early life:Gioconda Belli, of Northern Italian descent, was an active participant in the Sandinista struggle against the Somoza dictatorship, and her work for the movement led to her being forced into exile in Mexico in 1975...

, Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Hans Magnus Enzensberger , is a German author, poet, translator, and editor. He has also written under the pseudonym Andreas Thalmayr. He lives in Munich.- Life :...

, David Grossman

David Grossman

David Grossman is an Israeli author. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and have won numerous prizes.He is also a noted activist and critic of Israeli policy toward Palestinians. The Yellow Wind, his non-fiction study of the life of Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied...

, Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Magan Ali is a Somali-Dutch feminist and atheist activist, writer, politician who strongly opposes circumcision and female genital cutting. She is the daughter of the Somali politician and opposition leader Hirsi Magan Isse and is a founder of the women's rights organisation the AHA...

, Etgar Keret

Etgar Keret

Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer known for his short stories, graphic novels, and scriptwriting for film and television.-Personal Life:Keret was born in Ramat Gan, Israel in 1967. He is a third child to parents who survived the Holocaust. He lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, Shira Geffen, and...

, Elias Khoury

Elias Khoury (writer)

Elias Khoury is a Lebanese novelist, playwright, critic and a prominent public intellectual. He has published ten novels, which have been translated into several foreign languages, as well as several works of literary criticism. He has also written three plays...

, Henning Mankell

Henning Mankell

Henning Mankell is a Swedish crime writer, children's author, leftist activist and dramatist, best known for a series of mystery novels starring his most famous creation, Inspector Kurt Wallander.-Life and career:...

, Adam Michnik

Adam Michnik

Adam Michnik is the editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, where he sometimes writes under the pen-names of Andrzej Zagozda or Andrzej Jagodziński. In 1966–1989 he was one of the leading organizers of the illegal, democratic opposition in Poland...

, Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk

Ferit Orhan Pamuk , generally known simply as Orhan Pamuk, is a Turkish novelist. He is also the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches comparative literature and writing....

, Anne Provoost

Anne Provoost

Anne Provoost Anne Provoost Anne Provoost (born 26 July 1964 in the Belgian town of Poperinge, is a Flemish author who now lives in Antwerp with her husband and three children.-Career:...

, Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith is a British novelist. To date she has written three novels. In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors...

, Dương Thu Hương

Duong Thu Huong

Dương Thu Hương is a Vietnamese author and political dissident. Formerly a member of Vietnam's Communist party, she was expelled from the party in 1989, and has been denied the right to travel abroad, and was temporarily imprisoned for her writings and outspoken criticism of corruption in the...

, Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín is a multi-award-winning Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic, and, most recently, poet.Tóibín is Leonard Milberg Lecturer in Irish Letters at Princeton University in New Jersey and succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the...

, Ko Un

Ko Un

Ko Un is a South Korean poet. His works have been translated and published in more than 15 countries and he has been imprisoned many times...

, and Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson OBE is a British novelist.-Early years:Winterson was born in Manchester and adopted on 21 January 1960. She was raised in Accrington, Lancashire, by Constance and John William Winterson...

.

Immediately following the 2006 Festival, Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers is an American journalist and public commentator. He served as White House Press Secretary in the United States President Lyndon B. Johnson Administration from 1965 to 1967. He worked as a news commentator on television for ten years. Moyers has had an extensive involvement with public...

 hosted a television series on PBS

Public Broadcasting Service

The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

 entitled "Faith & Reason," which featured participants from the PEN Festival.

Selected 2006 Programs

• Tell That Story Again: Writing Myth Now
• Honor Killings: When Families Commit Murder to Save Face
• Faith and Politics in America and Elsewhere
• Faith & Reason: Writers Speak
• Exiles in America
• Translation and Globalization
• The Limits of Tolerance? Multiculturalism Now
• Just the Facts: Truth & the Internet
• 51%: Women Write the World
• Revolution: A User’s Manual
• Idols and Insults: Writing, Religion, and Freedom of Expression
• HOWL for 50 Years
• Conversation: Ayaan Hirsi Ali & Philip Gourevitch
• Suitable for Children
• Conversation: Amartya Sen & Salman Rushdie

PEN American Center offers audio downloads and photos from select events on their web site.

World Voices 2007

The third annual World Voices Festival took place in New York City from April 24 to April 29, 2007.

Extensive coverage was done by the online magazine the Wild River Review

Wild River Review

Wild River Review is an online magazine that publishes in-depth reporting, works of literature, art, visual art, reviews, interviews, and columns by and about contemporary artists, photographers, and writers. Founded in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the magazine has been operating since 2006 under...

.

External links

• PEN American Center
• PEN World Voices 2006 Media Library
• PEN World Voices 2005 Media Library
• PEN Podcasts
• Bill Moyers' Faith & Reason series
• Interviews & blog from the Wild River Review