Arundhati Roy to headline 2019 PEN World Voices Festival in New York

Author and activist Arundhati Roy will headline the 2019 PEN World Voices Festival to be held in New York from May 6 through May 12. According to the PEN America website, this year’s festival will bring together noteworthy writers and thinkers who will focus on “the dissolving boundary between the public and the private in the literary, cultural, social, and political realms.”  PEN America, a nonprofit group that advocates for freedom of expression, has hosted the annual World Voices festival since 2005.

Roy, the author of “The God of Small Things,” “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” and “My Seditious Heart,” will deliver the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, and will be joined in discussion by Siddhartha Deb (winner of the PEN/Open Book 2012 prize for “The Beautiful and the Damned”) on May 12.

“Presenting Arundhati Roy as the keynote speaker of this festival is nothing short of a dream come true for me,” the press release quoted Chip Rolley, director of the PEN World Voices Festival and senior director of Literary Programs at PEN America as saying. “Throughout her illustrious writing career, encompassing fiction of arresting lyricism and essays of incisive urgency, Arundhati Roy has been one of the most valiant defenders of the rights of both the individual and the collective,” he said.

Highlights of the festival include: “Women Uninterrupted,” a conversation between Inês Pedrosa, Elif Shafak and Jennifer Egan about writing unforgettable fictional female characters;

a conversation between the writers Dani Shapiro and Bridgett M. Davis about family secrets; an evening with the poet and documentarian Liao Yiwu, the novelist Ma Jian, organizers from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing and others; and a conversation titled “Love in the Time of Tinder” with the writers Niviaq Korneliussen and Gabriela Wiener.