Join us for three days of PEN World Voices Playwrights Festival at the Segal Center. 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. Caro Llewellyn, Festival Director. www.pen.org
PUBLIC LIVES / PRIVATE LIVES
The theme for the 2008 PEN World Voices Festival, Public Lives / Private Lives, will be illuminated from April 28 - May 4 across New York City. For the first time, this year, the Festival will spread beyond Manhattan, with programs in Albany and Rochester.
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 Roberts, Executive Director. www.pen.org
  The Segal Center PEN World Voices panels are presented in collaboration with NoPassport, founded byCaridad Svich.
With additional support from Theatre Without Borders, Immigrants Theatre Project, and Translation ThinkTank.
For information on other PEN programs at the Segal Center and the Complete PEN World Voices Festival 2008 goto: www.pen.org
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Martin E Segal Theatre, 6:00-8:00 pm
Binyavanga Wainaina, Kenya and Biljana Srbljanovic,Serbia
Excerpt readings from their work, directed by Liesl Tommy and Marcy Arlin, will be followed by a panel discussion with the artists and Tom Sellar.
Moderated by Marcy Arlin.
Binyavanga Wainaina (born 1971) is a Kenyan author, journalist and winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, in 2002, for his short story Discovering Home. He is the founding editor of Kwani?, the first literary magazine in East Africa since Transition Magazine. He has written for The East African, National Geographic, The Sunday Times (South Africa), Granta, the New York Times and The Guardian (UK). He is presently a Writer-in-Residence at Union College in Schenectady, NY(USA), where he is teaching, lecturing and working on a novel.
Biljana Srbljanovic (born 1970) is a Serbian playwright, TV/Film writer, political essayist, and part time professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. Her plays are translated in 24 languages, published and played in over a100 theaters in the world, mostly in Germany, France, Scandinavia, Austria, Russia, Poland, Belgium, theBalkansetc. She was awarded by the European Theater Award New Theatre Reality (2007) and Ernst Toller prize (1999). Politicaland animalrightsactivist, published her war diariesin 1999 in Italian daily La Repubblica. In 2002 as a Fulbright Fellow, visiting professor at the NYU-Tisch School of the Arts.
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Biljana Srbljanovic
Photo courtesy of the artist
Binyavanga Wainaina
Photo courtesy of the artist |
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Martin E. Segal Theatre: 3:00-4:30 pm
Panel - Personal Narrative and Public Consciousness
With Horatio Castallanos Moya, ElSalvador and Carmen Boullosa.
Moderated by Nathalie Handal.
Horatio Castallanos Moya was born in 1957 in Honduras, but grew up in El Salvador. Author of eight novels, he worked twelve years as a journalist in Mexico and has lived in Costa Rica, Canada, Guatemala, Spain, and Germany under the auspices of the Frankfurt International Book Fair. He currently resides in the U.S. as writer-in-residence of City of Asylum/Pittsburgh. His novels have been translated into French, German, Italian, and Portuguese. Senselessness will be published by New Directions in May, 2008.
Carmen Boullosa (born in Mexico City in 1954) is one of Mexico's leading novelists, poets and playwrights. Her work, including thirteen novels, art books and plays, has been translated into Italian, Dutch, German, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian. Boullosa is also a distinguished teacher, TV host, a fellow of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers and co-founded Café Nueva York. |
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Horatio Castallanos Moya
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Carmen Boullosa
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Martin E. Segal Theatre: 5:00-6:30 pm
Michel Tremblay, Quebec
An excerpt reading from Tremblay’s work, directed by Ian Morgan, will be followed by a disscussion with the author.
Moderated by Claudia Wilsch Case.
Michel Tremblay has been called one of the most daring writers in Québec and Canada for his use of the working-class joual dialect and the prominence of working- class themes in plays such as Les Belles-Sours and La duchesse de Langeais and in novels such as The Duchess and the Commoner. |
Michel tremblay
Photo courtesy of the artist
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Martin E. Segal Theatre: 7:00-9:00 pm
Kristín Ómarsdóttir, Iceland and Àngels Aymar, Spain, Catalonia
Excerpt readings from their work, directed by Shilarna Stokes and Hillary Spector, will be followed by a disscussion.
Moderated by Sarah Cameron Sunde.
Kristín Ómarsdóttir was born in Reykjavík in 1962 and has published books of poetry, short stories and novels, and written plays for the theatre. Three of Ómarsdóttir´s novels have been translated and published in Sweden, and one of the novels in France, T'es pas la seule à être morte. Kristín received Gríman, The Icelandic Playwright Award, in the year 2005, for her play, Segđu mér allt (Tell me everything).
Àngels Aymar is a resident playwright at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya and works as an actress, award winning playwright and theater director. She has written twenty plays in Catalan, which have been translated and published in Spanish, English, French, Romanian, German and Italian, and her work has been presented on three continients. With the collaboration of the North American Embassy, Italian Culture Institute, O.I.B. of Brussels and the New Dramatist New York, she designed and coordinated the First International Interchange of Writers for the Association of Stage-Creatores Project Vaca. |
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Àngels Aymar
Photo courtesy of the artist
KristÍn ÓmarsdÓttir
Photo courtesy of the artist |
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Martin E. Segal Theatre: 2:30-3:50 pm
NoPassport Panel
Writing and Political Responsibility in Theatre
Moderated by Caridad Svich
With Migdalia Cruz, Jason Grote, Chiori Miyagawa, and Fiona Templeton
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XIMENA ESCALANTE
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Martin E. Segal Theatre:
4:30-6:00 pm
Ximena Escalante, Mexico
Excerpt readings from Escalante’s work, translated by Andrea Thome and directed by Mallory Catlett and John Rubin, will be followed by dialogue with Ximena Escalante and Migdalia Cruz on Re-shaping the Classics.
Moderated by Caridad Svich.
Ximena Escalante was born in Mexico. A playwright, director and journalist,
she studied stage directing in Mexico at the University Theatre Center, she has
also studied creative writing and theatre at RESAD in Spain. She has written
several plays, among them are: La Siesta de Pirandello, Voluptuosa Colette, Yo
También quiero un Profeta, and Fedra y otras griegas.
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Martin E. Segal Theatre:
6:30-8:00 pm
Alvis Hermanis, Latvia
An excerpt reading from Hermanis’s work, directed by Cosmin Chivu, will be followed by a dialogue between Alvis Hermanis, and Christopher Shinn on cultural responsibility and the role of the writer.
Moderated by Kate Loewald.
Alvis Hermanis was born in Latvia in 1965. In 1993 his first performance of Y.
Mishima’s Marquise de Sade won the Best Production of the Year Award and
the Best Debut in Stage Direction Award at the annual theatre festival of Latvia.
In 1997 Hermanis became the Artistic Director of the New Riga Theatre (NRT).
His work has been shown at international theatre festivals in Europe, Russia
and Canada and has won him many prizes in Latvia including the IX Europe
Prize for New Theatrical Realities in 2007.
Christopher Shinn’s plays have been premiered by the Royal Court, Lincoln
Center, Manhattan Theatre Club, Playwrights Horizons, the Vineyard Theatre,
South Coast Rep, and Soho Theatre, and later seen around the world. He is a
winner of an OBIE in Playwriting, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting.
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Alvis Hermanis
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