The PEN Ten Interview Series
The PEN Ten is on the pulse of literary culture to help you discover your next great read. In this interview series, we ask authors 10 questions about their latest work and art.
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
The PEN Ten with Nathaniel Bellows
Art, as a pursuit, has a place and purpose in the “public” sphere. There are few other known forces in the world that can provide such comfort, solace, provocation,… 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
The PEN Ten with T Cooper
I was at dinner with my folks the other night, and my dad was telling me about a time I was about five, and we were in another country,… More
The PEN Ten with Jimmy Santiago Baca
What is the responsibility of the writer? To toss out like old rotten salad the yearning for fame and money and get busy fighting for human rights and protesting… More
The PEN Ten with Monique Truong
Writers or rather our works begin the conversations about the difficult, unanswerable subjects of life, and often our works keep the conversations going when everyone else would rather forget.… More
The PEN Ten with emily m. danforth
I fear that it sounds too nicey-nice, too passive, which isn’t my intention—writers can and should agitate and expose and upset. But I still think there’s something there in… More
PEN Ten with Chris Abani
Writers and storytellers as a whole are curators of our common humanity. This is difficult because we curate not just the good, but also the bad, the totality that… More
The PEN Ten with Alexander Chee
At some point recently I realized I mostly read about assassins. Assassins and sex work—in particular, I'm fascinated by the new porn narratives, the way porn has moved on… More
The PEN Ten with Karen Emmerich
The writer might have no responsibilities whatsoever, but the translator has only responsibilities—or at least that’s the popular perception. That’s why we’re always failing—according, again, to the popular perception.… More
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