PEN American Center - 2009 World Voices Festival

Home > 2009 World Voices Festival

The Fifth Annual

6 days. 160 writers.

A stellar line-up of established and emerging authors from 40 countries take the stage in venues across the city for 6 packed days of conversations, panels, performances and readings. In this year of landmark anniversaries—Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the Cuban Revolution (1959), the collapse of Communism across Eastern Europe (1989), and Tiananmen Square (1989)—writers from around the globe consider how the world changes and how we change.

EVOLUTION/REVOLUTION

Festival authors write in on this year's theme.

Anthropoids
by Mary Ann Hoberman

The next time you go to the zoo . . . [More]

An Essay
by Daniel Menaker

In the last five years, it has appeared very likely that literature and storytelling as we have known them for thousands of years will be affected radically . . . [More]

Poems
by Fuad Rifka

He opens the windows of his head
God recedes into the distance . . . [More]

Abenteuer eines jungen Affen
by Uwe Kolbe

Wie oft in meinem Leben war auch diesmal die Initiative nicht von mir ausgegangen. [More]

Golden Calves
by Mark Kurlansky

Every year at the time of the Passover holiday this question starts itching me. [More]

Standing in the Midst of Change
by Hwang Sok-Yong

These days I call myself a young writer. [More]

The Year We Drowned
by Susan Bernofsky

Grandmother is a young woman, hardly older than me, and is walking in the woods somewhere in Mitteleuropa . . . [More]

How Does the World Change?
by Nawal El Saadawi

Who is changing the world? And to whose interest? [More]

Little Hungary
by Péter Nádas, Eszter Babarczy, Zsófia Bán, László Garaczi, and János Térey

Little Jack lived in Little Hungary in a little Hungarian tenement house. [More]

After "The Fact"
by Raja Shehadeh

There were serious controversies about the project . . . [More]

Night Zoo
by Zsófia Bán
translated by Paul Olchvary

My heart began racing the moment I reached the entrance. We hadn’t seen each other for a week . . . [More]

The Story of the Second Slap in the Face and the Tides of the World
by Paul Verhaeghen

I come home, my lips still stained with black chocolate icing . . . [More]

A Poem
by Dany Laferrière

Les humains aiment les dates . . . [More]

Dead on arrival
by Armin Petras
translated by Cordula Brucker

Twenty years already, not bad. The wall is open, Germany reunified. [More]

2009 WORLD VOICES AUDIO

The Inspired Scientist
With Majora Carter, Tijs Goldschmidt, Kimiko Hahn, Sandeep Jauhar, and Harriet A. Washington; moderated by Robert Krulwich

The Economic Crisis and How to Deal With It
With Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, Robin Wells, and Jeff Madrick

Left/Right Literature: The Politics of Taking Up the Pen
With Nadeem Aslam, Norbert Gstrein, Mariken Jongman, Khet Mar, and Domenico Starnone

Richard Ford in Conversation with Nam Le

The Translation Slam
With Javier Calvo, Narcís Comadira, Nick Laird, Valerie Meyer, Michael F. Moore, Mary Ann Newman, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Muriel Barbery
In conversation with Adam Gopnik