Today marks the official start of the third annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York City. The six-day schedule of events includes readings, lectures, and panel discussions featuring 162 writers from forty-five different countries representing twenty-one different languages.
Tonight's kick-off event, which will be held at the Cooper Union Great Hall, is a series of readings on the environment by novelists Jonathan Franzen, Moses Isegawa, Pico Iyer, Marilynne Robinson, Roxanna Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Gary Shteyngart, and Colson Whitehead and poet Billy Collins. Each writer will read from the work of other writers on the subject of the natural world.
Other events in the PEN World Voices Festival include readings by Don DeLillo, Keran Desai, Dave Eggers, Nadine Gordimer, David Grossman, Steve Martin, Sam Shepard, Lawrence Weschler and others at thirty venues around New York City. For more information, visit www.pen.org.
