Monday, May 4, 2015, 7:30pm
PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, NYC
The Great Hall
The Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street
Manhattan
For this flagship opening night event, leading writers from around the globe present their worst- and best-case scenarios for where the world may be in the year 2,050, offering insights they haven’t yet published, and the opportunity to consider how our future is intimately tied to our present.
Fedor Alexandrovich, Mona Eltahawy, Richard Flanagan, Aminatta Forna, Zanele Muholi, Lola Shoneyin, Tom Stoppard, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Binyavanga Wainaina, Jackie Wang
Fedor Alexandrovich is a Ukrainian poet, artist, and independent filmmaker. A graduate of and teacher at Kiev’s National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, he has presented some forty performances in Ukraine’s theaters. He was the inspiration for and star of The Russian Woodpecker, which documents his discovery of a dark secret dating from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and was a Grand Jury Prizewinner at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.
Mona Eltahawy is an Egyptian American freelance journalist and commentator. Her essays and op-eds on Egypt, the Islamic world, and women’s rights have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Miami Herald, and other publications. She has appeared as a guest commentator on MSNBC, BBC, CNN, PBS, Al-Jazeera, NPR, and dozens of other television and radio networks. She lives in Cairo.
Aminatta Forna was born in Scotland, raised in Sierra Leone and Britain, and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand, and Zambia. She is the award-winning author of the novels The Hired Man, The Memory of Love, and Ancestor Stones, and a memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water. She is professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University and in 2013 held the post of Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College, Massachusetts. In March 2014 she received a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, awarded annually by Yale University.
Sir Tom Stoppard is one of British theater’s most prolific exports: a giant of modern playwriting, and one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. Stoppard has written extensively for TV, radio, film, and stage, with works including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Arcadia, and the screenplay for the Academy Award-winning Shakespeare in Love. He is the recipient of one Academy Award, four Tony Awards, and a Golden Lion. Much of his body of work has been met with both critical and popular acclaim.
Zanele Muholi is a South African visual activist. She was born in Umlazi, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, and currently lives in Johannesburg. Muholi co-founded the Forum for Empowerment of Women (FEW) in 2002, and in 2009 founded Inkanyiso (www.inkanyiso.org), a forum for queer and visual activist media. Her self-proclaimed mission is “to re-write a black queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of our resistance and existence at the height of hate crimes in South Africa and beyond.” She continues to train and co-facilitate photography workshops for young women in the townships.
Muholi studied advanced photography at the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg. In 2009 completed an MFA in documentary media at Ryerson University, Toronto.
She has won numerous awards, including the Ryerson Alumni Achievement Award (2015), the Fine Prize for an emerging artist at the 2013 Carnegie International, the Prince Claus Award (2013), the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award for Arts (2013), the Casa Africa Award for best female photographer, and a Fondation Blachère prize at Bamako Encounters Biennial of African Photography (2009). Her Faces and Phases series was shown at, among others, the South African pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), Documenta 13 (2012), and the 29th São Paulo Biennal (2010). She is shortlisted for the 2015 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for her publication Faces and Phases: 2006-14 (Steidl/The Walther Collection).
Muholi is an honorary professor at the University of the Arts Bremen.
Lola Shoneyin’s work includes three books of poems: So All the Time I Was Sitting on an Egg, Song of a Riverbird, and For the Love of Flight, and two children’s books: Mayowa and the Masquerades and Iyaji, the Housegirl. Her novel, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2011 and went on to win the 2011 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. She is the director of Aké Arts and Book Festival, an annual literary and cultural event in Nigeria. She resides in Lagos with her four children and three dogs.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a novelist, essayist, playwright, journalist, editor, academic, and social activist. He was born in Kenya in 1938, into a large peasant family, and was educated in Kenya, Uganda, and Britain. A recipient of ten honorary doctorates, he is formerly Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Languages and professor of comparative literature and performance studies at New York University, and is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.
Binyavanga Wainaina is the founding editor of Kwani?, a leading African literary magazine based in Kenya. He won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing and has written for Vanity Fair, Granta, and The New York Times. Wainaina directs the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College.
Jackie Wang is a queer poet, essayist, filmmaker, performer, alien, and prison abolitionist based out of Cambridge, MA. Her work has been published in LIES, Action Yes, PANK, Delirious Hem, DIAGRAM, The Brooklyn Rail, October, the Semiotext(e) Whitney Biennial pamphlet series, and other worthy outlets. In her critical essays she writes about queer sexuality, race, gender, the politics of writing, mixed-race identity, prisons and police, the politics of safety and innocence, and revolutionary struggles. If you summon her, she will come: loneberry@gmail.com. Follow her on twitter @LoneberryWang.
Tickets: $15/$10 PEN Members and students with valid ID.
Purchase tickets here or call (866) 811-4111. On-site sales: credit card only.