Interviews & Features
PEN America produces a breadth of interviews and features throughout the year.
The PEN Ten with Nathan Deuel
When you've lived and worked in places where writing can get you killed, where the act of telling the truth can take down powers, it's hard to have anything… More
The PEN Ten with Uwem Akpan
If secondary school girls are being abducted for learning how to read and write, the whole enterprise of reading and writing is destroyed and a whole generation of girls… More
The PEN Ten with Lawrence Venuti
The translator ... bears an enormous responsibility, not just in relation to the source text, but in representing a foreign culture. Translations can create or strengthen stereotypes of foreign… More
The PEN Ten with Rigoberto González
Observation is posing interesting questions. Surveillance is getting specific answers. Only one of those is meant to be used against the private citizen. The line, then, depends entirely on… More
The PEN Ten with Daniel Handler
Writers have a collective purpose precisely because the notion of a public intellectual has fallen out of fashion. The most interesting ideas, the most crucial philosophies, are always secrets… More
The PEN Ten with Maud Newton
For me at least, the things that feel most daring to write or to say don't really sound all that earth-shattering to other people. I remember the first time… More
The PEN Ten with Roxana Robinson
What the writer does is bear witness: we tell the stories of the things that disturb us most, and we try to tell them in the way that will… More
Three Questions with Cathy Park Hong
In literature, dystopic narrative has been used hubristically as a way to face one’s own mortality. An aging author, say someone like John Updike, conjures an apocalyptic narrative because… More
Three Questions with Heather Christle
I do not believe in trying to keep the work original. If that happens—if such an occurrence is possible—I believe it is necessarily a byproduct of a desire to… More
The PEN Ten with Je Banach
Writing may be courageous, but reading and speaking about what we read are also courageous acts. The discourse we create when we talk about books is daring just as… More