Africa and the World
I’ve been asked very loosely to think about the relationship of African writers and Africa at large to American writing. An enormous topic, of course, but I’ll offer a… More
Africa and the World: Writers at Home and Away
ACHMAT DANGOR: History. We all have our stories.Forty years ago, at the eager age of sixteen, I had to appear before a race-classification board in Pretoria, South Africa, because… More
Africa and the World
ZAKES MDA: I will read a passage here from The Whale Caller, which is a novel set in South Africa in a small town called Hermanus. Hermanus is well… More
Africa and the World: Writers at Home and Away
BREYTEN BREYTENBACH: If one mentions the word “Africa” in a global context, it tends to evoke many responses and perhaps even some obsessions. People tend to project on the… More
Elena Poniatowska: Confronting the Worst: Writing and Catastrophe
I’m going to read a testimony from a person who helped during the 1985 earthquake in Mexico. It’s a young boy, about eighteen:We reached the baseball park in the… More
The Power of the Pen: Jonathan Franzen
JONATHAN FRANZEN: To the extent that the written word is a word of political utterance, it obviously can change something. Probably at least 50 percent of the time for… More
The Power of the Pen: Margaret Atwood
MARGARET ATWOOD: Does writing change anything? I took this question literally, and I’m reading two pieces. One is about our feeling as writers—probably not, we think sometimes. And the… More
Francois Bizot: Confronting the Worst: Writing and Catastrophe
In 1971, I was caught by a revolutionary communist in Cambodia. I was chained and condemned to death and before that, interrogated by a young man who asked me… More
Crossover Artists: Writing in Another Language
SHAN SA: I apologize, first of all, for my accent. It’s a really horrible, Chinese-French accent because I’m Chinese and I’m living in Paris now and I’m writing in… More
The Most Insidious Censorship: A Conversation
K. ANTHONY APPIAH: As member’s of PEN’s Freedom-to-Write Committee, we’re heirs to a tradition of worrying mostly about the role of governments in restricting access to information, which is… More
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