In the fractious time after the Sept. 11 attacks, then-PEN America President Salman Rushdie thought back to a lively Congress of writers held by PEN America many years before.
The 1986 PEN Congress in New York City brought together 600 writers from around the globe, led by then-PEN America President Norman Mailer. But convening strong-minded literary figures wasn’t easy. Women writers felt underrepresented. South African writers were upset that a government official had been invited to speak.
“It was sort of exciting for a young writer to be there amongst all these giants yelling at each other,” Rushdie told The New York Times years later. “There were lots and lots of really terrible arguments.”
That sort of contretemps is at the heart of what became the PEN World Voices Festival – and of the broader PEN America mission to foster dialogue across difference. Founded by Rushdie, Esther Allen, and Michael Roberts in the wake of 9/11, the festival aims to counter U.S. isolationism and broaden the channels of dialogue between the United States and the world.
In its 20th year, the 2025 PEN World Voices Festival features a glittery lineup of 100+ literary luminaries, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Francine Prose – who both also appeared at the first ever festival – Ava DuVernay, Jennifer Egan, M. Gessen, Sheila Heti, and Siri Hustvedt for four days of events April 30-May 3 in New York and Los Angeles.
The festival comes at a time of grave consequence for writers around the world, and of growing polarization in the United States and within the literary community. The controversy buffeting PEN America and other cultural organizations amid the war in Palestine led to canceling the festival in 2024.
Founded in 2004, the goal of the festival was to broaden American horizons and foster conversations from a variety of vantages that spanned the globe. The first festival in 2005 featured Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Nuruddin Farah, Jonathan Franzen, and Antonio Muñoz Molina answering the question, “Does Writing Change Anything?”
“To the extent that the written word is a word of political utterance, it obviously can change something,” Franzen began in his answer. “Probably at least 50 percent of the time for the worse.”
Atwood looked at it another way: “If you take the question a couple of levels back and realize that a lot of people in the world can’t write at all, just the ability to change from being somebody who can’t write to being somebody who can makes a huge difference in that person’s life and then in the life of their family, and then in the life of their community.”
The participants that year included Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paul Auster, Ali Bader, Gish Jen, Ha Jin, Ryszard Kapuściński, Khaled Mattawa, Rick Moody, Azar Nafisi, Michael Ondaatje, Luc Sante, Elif Shafak, Wole Soyinka, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and speaking about topics as varied – and relevant – as appropriation, home, sex, power, trauma, colonialism, and war in the Middle East.
“I’ve been reading books about Hitler, books about Stalin. … I’ve been reading them the way a hypochondriac reads health newsletters, looking for the warning signs,” Francine Prose said at that first festival in 2005. Twenty years later, Prose will speak on a panel presented by PEN America and PEN International: On Autocracy and the Slow Death of Democracy.
The festivals that followed have featured Nobel Prize winners (Nadine Gordimer, Mario Vargas Llosa, Toni Morrison, and Orhan Pamuk) an almost-president (Hillary Clinton), a Supreme Court Justice (Sonia Sotomayor) legends of the stage and screen (Tony Kushner, Steve Martin, Trevor Noah, Sam Shepard, Patti Smith, Marisa Tomei), and an embarrassment of literary lights (Martin Amis, Michael Cunningham, Don DeLillo, Kiran Desai, E.L. Doctorow, Umberto Eco, Dave Eggers, Roxane Gay, Christopher Hitchens, A.M. Homes, Jhumpa Lahiri, Fran Lebowitz, Arundhati Roy, Marjane Satrapi, Amartya Sen, Art Spiegelman, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Colson Whitehead, and Jeanette Winterson among them.)
The festival has provided a forum for writers to debate and share their work – and for all of us to benefit from the exchanges and expand our horizons.
“One of my things of greatest pride is to have co-founded the PEN World Voices Festival, which in its origin really was a way of introducing American readers to the rest of the world, to make the literary experience of Americans less parochial, perhaps,” Rushdie told Time magazine last year. “And it succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”
Does writing change anything? We know it does.
