PEN American Center is the largest branch of the world's oldest international human rights and literary organization. International PEN was founded in 1921 as an association of writers working to advance literature, defend free expression, and foster international literary fellowship, and the 141 PEN centers in 99 countries that together compose International PEN continue that mission today. 
Michael Vinaver
SPRING 2007 progRams
peN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL
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SPRING 2007 progRams peN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL |
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As New York's first international writers' festival, PEN World Voices is an answer to American cultural insularity and an attempt to enrich and sustain a global dialogue. Each spring the Festival brings writers from all over the world to New York City to introduce American audiences to the finest international literature. www.pen.org “Home & Away”, April 24-29, 2007 67 events, 162 writers, 45 countries, 21 languages… endless possibilities! How do we define the places we live and how do they define us? Join Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Neil Gaiman, David Grossman, Guillermo Arriaga, Laila Lalami, Dave Eggers, Saadi Youssef, Steve Martin, Sam Shepard, Patti Smith, and many others for six exhilarating days of conversations, debates and readings exploring the theme of “Home & Away”. Proudly presented by PEN American Center and taking place in venues throughout the city, 2007 PEN World Voices brings together a dazzling line-up of international writers with some of U.S. best-known authors to discuss topics as varied as today’s migrations and changing notions of nation and identity, the planetary threat of environmental degradation, and how literature can help us to better understand our relationship to our own and each other’s homes. Do not miss this unique opportunity to celebrate the rich mix of languages and cultures found in New York City, and the metropolis’s vital link to other nations and people from around the globe. To view a complete schedule of events, visit: http://www.pen.org/festival
Co-presented by The Martin E. Segal Theater Center, The Graduate Center, CUNY in collaboration with Polish Cultural Institute; The Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York, Theater Without Borders: Translation ThinkTank; Immigrants’ Theatre Project; NoPassport, and The Playwrights' Center, Minneapolis. Special thanks to the Institut Ramon Llull, the Québec Government, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy; The Portuguese Library and Book Institute, The New York Review of Books, and Ledig House. |
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From Page to Stage I
Participants Vladimir Sorokin (Russia) was born on August 7, 1955 in the small town of Bykovo, near Moscow, he made his literary debut in 1972 in the large industrial newspaper Za kadry neftyanikov. Sorokin's works, bright and striking examples of underground culture, were banned during the Soviet period. His first publication in the USSR appeared in November 1989, when the Riga-based Latvian magazine Rodnik (Spring) presented a group of Sorokin's stories. In September 2001,Vladimir Sorokin received the National Booker Award; two months later, he was presented with the Award of Andrey Beliy for outstanding contributions to Russian literature. Abela Farhoud (Lebanon/Québec) was born in Lebanon in 1952 and immigrated to Canada with her family in the 1950s. She worked as an actress in Québec, Lebanon, and France before turning her attention to playwrighting in 1982. Farhoud completed an M.A. from the Université du Québec Montréal in 1985. Her thesis was eventually published as her play Les filles du 5-10-15¢. Dorota Masłowska (Poland) was born in 1983 in the Polish village of Wejcherowo. Her debut book, Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną (Snow White and Russian Red) won instant acclaim and notoriety, winning the prestigious 2003 Polityka Passport in the literature category for "her personal take on Polish reality and creative use of common language." The book is now being filmed by noted director Jan Jakub Kolski. Her second novel, The Queen's Peacock, 2005, won Poland's highest literary award, the NIKE, a controversial choice over seven other finalists, including Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska. In 2006 Masłowska's debut play, Two Poor Romanians Speaking Polish, was commissioned and staged by the TR Warsaw theatre. Masłowska has pursued cultural studies at Warsaw University; she currently collaborates with several magazines. TR WARSZAWA (Poland), formerly Teatr Rozmaitosci in Warsaw, has for decades been one of Poland’s best-known stages. It has secured a reputation as a contemporary theatre open to new ideas while preserving theatrical traditions. TR has made its mark in Europe and won numerous awards at national and international theatre festivals. Poland’s most popular stage directors – Grzegorz Jarzyna (artistic director since 1998, since 2006 also general director) Krzysztof Warlikowski, and Krystian Lupa – as well as the country’s most famous actors, work at TR. The theatre constantly looks for new forms of theatrical expression, not only in contemporary drama, but also in reinterpretations of classic plays. In the 2005/06 season, TR Warszawa invited its audience to participate in a new project: TR/PL, which as its name suggests has two areas of interest: THEATRE and POLAND. Young playwrights invited to take part in the project were given a task: to describe how the recent political, social and cultural changes in Poland have influenced their way of life and their perception of the reality. In 2006 Maslowska’s text was published in one of the first anthologies of Polish contemporary plays. All the plays in the book were commissioned by the theatre, read on stage, and then published as a part of this project. A Couple of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians was then staged by TR Warszawa, directed by Przemyslaw Wojcieszek. |
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From Page to Stage II
Participants Michel Vinaver (France) was born in Paris in 1927. He had two novels published by Gallimard, in 1950 and 1951, on the recommendation of Albert Camus. In parallel with his business career working for the Gillette Company, he started as a playwright in 1955, never to return to the narrative form. His dramatic works include 18 plays and 7 adaptations or translations, alongside theoretical and critical essays. Upon leaving Gillette, he was appointed professor of Dramatic Studies at Université Paris III and subsequently Paris VIII. Vinaver owes to Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut — which awarded him a Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1947 — the revelation of T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, which he translated and which has had a never-ending impact on his dramatic writing. Patrícia Melo (Brazil) was born in 1962. She is a novelist, scriptwriter, and playwright. In 1999 Time magazine included her among their fifty “Latin American Leaders for the New Millennium.” Her third novel, Inferno, was published in 2003, and in the same year Patrícia was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
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Conversation Geert Mak is the author of a number of works of nonfiction, including In Europe: A Journey Through the Twentieth Century. As a journalist and historian, he has brought to light the fabric of life in the countryside and cities of many nations around the world. With Ian Buruma, author of Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, he will discuss Islam and Europe, the effects of immigration, and coming under fire from Dutch neoconservatives. Thursday, April 26th, 5:00 p.m.- 6:00 p.m. | ||||||
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Voices From Today’s Iran Participants: Shahriar Mandanipour, Moniru Ravanipur, Goli Taraghi; moderated by Robert Silvers Join Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, for an exploration of contemporary Iran from the perspectives of some of that country’s most important writers. Goli Taraghi is one of Iran’s most revered and admired authors of short stories and novels. Her titles include I Am Che Guevara Too and Winter Sleep. Shahriar Mandanipour is the author of five collections of short stories. His most recent anthology, Ultramarine Blue, gathers 11 stories that relate in various ways to the events of 9/11. Moniru Ravanipur is the author of eight works of fiction, many set in the remote village in Southern Iran where she was born. A short-story writer and novelist, she was among 17 writers and intellectuals to face trial in Iran because of their participation in the 2000 Berlin Conference. Saturday, April 28th, 12:00-1:00 p.m. |
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Conversation Critically acclaimed novelists Abdulrazak Gurnah and Caryl Phillips have written many novels about displacement and loss, real lives in fictional guises, and the need to give voice to the silenced. In the forthcoming Foreigners, Caryl Phillips traces a young Nigerian’s terrifying journey to the United Kingdom and eventually to his death at the hands of the police. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertionexplores the legacy of slavery and colonialism in Zanzibar and how the institution complicated that country’s revolution and movement toward independence in the early 1950s. Moderated by Radhika Jones of The Paris Review. Saturday, April 28th, 1:30-2:30 p.m. |
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From Page to Stage III
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