Organizer: PEN America
Type/Location: In Person / New York, NY
Description
Globally, political and cultural forces are aligning to narrowly define national identities. Surging book bans, the outlawing of languages, the erasure of histories from official records, and the censorship of words increasingly limit who belongs and delineate who is other. Literature subverts that.
For the World Voices Festival’s closing night event, PEN America President Dinaw Mengestu will convene prominent international writers to discuss how literature champions a diversity of cultures and reflects the multiple heritages, customs, and traditions we all carry. Joining Mengestu in this vital conversation are Tash Aw (The South), Susan Choi (Flashlight), and Madeleine Thien (The Book of Records).
CART caption is provided at this event. Captioning is being provided, in part, by a grant from NYSCA/TDF TAP Plus.
About the Speakers:
Tash Aw is the author of five novels, including, most recently, The South, and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, Strangers on a Pier, a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize. His work has won the Whitbread and Commonwealth Prizes, an O. Henry Award, and been longlisted three times for the Man Booker Prize. His novels have been translated into 26 languages and been longlisted for the Prix Médicis Étranger, Prix Inrocks, and Premio Gregor von Rezzori. As an essayist and critic, he has contributed to The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Guardian, among many other publications. He has translated two books by Édouard Louis, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations (2022, shortlisted for the TA First Translation Award) and The Collapse (forthcoming, 2026). He is the holder of fellowships from the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin program, the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the Santa Maddalena Foundation, and the Shanghai Writers Association. He is currently the Samuel Fischer Gastprofessur for Literature at Freie Universität in Berlin. He lives in Paris and Kuala Lumpur.
Susan Choi is the author of Flashlight, her latest novel, which is currently shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is also the author of Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for Fiction, and the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and My Education. She is a recipient of the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction, the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Madeleine Thien is a writer born in Vancouver and the daughter of Malaysian Chinese immigrants to Canada. She is the author of a story collection and four novels, most recently The Book of Records, which was named a book of the year by Time, The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The New York Public Library, featured on Obama’s list of favourite books of 2025, and longlisted for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Her 2016 novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing won a Governor-General’s Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Folio Prize. In 2024, she received the Writers Trust of Canada Engel-Findley Award in recognition of work to date and in anticipation of future contributions. Her novels have been translated into twenty-seven languages, and her essays and stories can be found in The New Yorker, Granta, Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Since 2018, she has taught in the MFA Program at Brooklyn College at The City University of New York. She lives in Montreal.
Registration:
To attend the event in person, please purchase tickets here.