When: Friday, November 13, 2009

Where: 480 Lexington Avenue NYC 10017

What Time: 7:00 pm

The Asian American Writers' Workshop is hosting "Page Turner," its first all-day literary festival, this Saturday at Brooklyn's powerHouse Arena—and on Friday night, the Workshop will present PEN member Sonny Mehta with its Lifetime Achievement Award in a ceremony that features an appearance by one of  Knopf's literary stars, Michael Ondaatje.

There are two levels of access to the Friday night event: $50 lets you in on a cocktail reception at 7 p.m., but for $500 you can stick around for the gala dinner afterwards. (Both tickets include full access to Saturday's events, which are also priced separately or on a day-pass.)

GalleyCat senor editor Ron Hogan is one of many guest speakers Saturday; he'll be moderating a discussion about "Queering the Asian-American Coming of Age Story" with novelists Alexander Chee, Abha-Dawesar, and Rakesh Satyal that afternoon.

Sonny Mehta: The son of an Indian diplomat, Ajai Singh Mehta spent his childhood in India and Switzerland before moving to England to attend Cambridge. After briefly considering a career as a writer, he joined London publisher Paladin and made a splash in 1970 with the publication of the groundbreaking feminist tome The Female Eunuch, which he had encouraged his Cambridge classmate Germaine Greer to write. By 1972 Mehta was running paperback giant Pan Books, and he spent more than a decade and a half as one of the most prominent figures on the British publishing scene.

The opportunity to conquer the New York publishing market came in 1987 when Mehta got a call from then-Random House chairman Si Newhouse, who asked him to move to New York and take over Knopf, replacing editor Robert Gottlieb, who left to succeed William Shawn as editor of The New Yorker. Mehta accepted the job and moved stateside. Among the many notable authors Mehta has published are Haruki Murakami, Joan Didion, and John Updike.