As books like The Kite Runner and Reading Lolita in Tehran dominate the bestseller list, there are other signs that U.S. readers may be waking up to writers born abroad. The week-long PEN World Voices festival of international literature, which closed April 22, drew more than 8,000 people to 43 events in New York City. Many panels were sold out, forcing the organizers to turn away an estimated 2,000.
"We guessed the audience would be there, but it was a real thrill to see the response," said Salman Rushdie, president of the PEN American Center, who attributed the diverse and youthful turnout to an "enormous amount of blogging" about the festival. With 75 foreign writers and 36 from the U.S., it was the largest international gathering of writers in New York since the PEN congress in 1986.
Though the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, NPR's The Next Big Thing and C-SPAN covered the festival, the organizers struggled to interest major national media. "The turnout shows that people feel the need to inform themselves about the world, and they're not getting it from the broadcast media," observed Rushdie. Meanwhile, the international press turned out in droves, from nearly every European country, as well as Argentina, Brazil and Hong Kong. "The world was intrigued by American reciprocal interest for a change," said Michael Roberts, PEN American Center's executive director,
The festival grew out of concern about the low figures for foreign literature published in the U.S. (of the 185,000 adult trade books published in English here last year, only 874 titles were translated). "We wanted to begin to address this problem by working to develop New York—and ultimately national—audiences for writing from abroad," said Roberts, who found willing sponsors in Time Warner, Random House, Mont Blanc and W Hotels.
Among the best-attended events were "The Power of the Pen: Does Writing Change Anything?," a panel with Margaret Atwood, Nuruddin Farah, Ha Jin and others, and tributes to Cervantes and Czeslaw Milosz. The programs are available in streaming audio at www.pen.org.
