Caught between its free-expression mandate and author withdrawals, PEN America cancels its 2024 World Voices Festival.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

Nossel: ‘We Share the Anguish’

Our readers will recall that a week ago (April 23), we wrote of how PEN America had canceled its planned April 29 annual literary awards after almost half of the writers and translators nominated withdrew their books from consideration.

By Friday (April 26), news from PEN in New York City began indicating that the same fate had hit the planned May 8 World Voices Festival, which was meant to be staged in both Los Angeles and New York. As in the case of the PEN America Literary Awards events, the driver here is cancellations by writers—whose work is central to the structure, success, and impact of the festival.

Nossel: ‘We Are Listening to Our Critics’

One interesting dynamic here is that in this second major US PEN event lost to writer cancellations in a week’s time, the way that PEN America’s team has announced the situation seems to be carrying more notes of diplomacy.

For example, as the United States this week has seen pepper spray fired by law-enforcement teams on entrenched campus pro-Palestinian protests in various major venues, PEN’s media messaging includes a direct statement of acknowledgment that seems to go beyond such candor in the earlier awards event comments. The emphases that follow here are ours, for illustration.

“Many writers explained their withdrawal from the event as an expression of protest directed toward PEN America’s response to the war in Gaza.

“However, we have also heard from dozens of writers who have had to endure harsh attacks on social media and heavy demands to distance themselves from PEN America. Many expressed genuine fear to us.”

The fact that there are descriptions here of direct agitation against PEN is new.

The statement goes on, “As an organization that cares deeply about the freedom of writers to speak their conscience, we are concerned about any circumstance in which writers tell us they feel shut down, or that speaking their minds bears too much risk. Amid this climate, it became impossible to mount the festival in keeping with the principles upon which it was founded 20 years ago.”

And this is an existential conundrum for such an organization—both distressing and fascinating—in which the American PEN organization finds itself:

• Its own expressions of what its people have felt were the correct responses to the wrenching political challenges of the Gaza crisis mean that rejection, contention, and even confrontation are following.
• Those rejections, contention, and confrontation cannot be denied or disrespected by PEN, if the organization is to remain true to its core positions.

‘Across Wide Chasms of Worldview and Belief’

Suzzane Nossel, the CEO of PEN America some of whose own comments in the past have not been made without criticism, now is quoted, saying, “PEN America exists to unite writers in defense of free expression.

“The premise of World Voices is to engage across wide chasms of worldview and belief, including fostering direct conversation between and among those who disagree profoundly.

“We share the anguish over the loss of life and devastation of the war. We are listening to our critics.”

Nossel continues in several lines designed to offer the “we’re getting it” message to PEN’s community:

“Over the last seven months, we have consistently taken and will continue to take steps to strengthen the core of our work: to support writers and stand for free expression.

“We now face a campaign that casts our struggle to reflect complexity, uphold our identity as a big tent organization, and show fealty to our principles as a moral abdication.

“The perspective that engaging with those who hold a different point of view constitutes an impermissible act of legitimization negates the very possibility of dialogue. It also betrays the essence of PEN’s charter and mission to dispel hatreds and engage writers and literature as a catalyst for empathy and a bridge toward common ground.”

Writing about the festival cancellation and PEN’s comments to the news media, Jennifer Schuessler writes at The New York Times, “In recent months, PEN America has been increasingly consumed with defending itself, as a series of open letters have sharply criticized the group’s leadership and position on the war, with some even accusing it of being a mouthpiece for the United States or Israeli governments.”

Indeed, praise for the actions of writers who have stared down PEN America on such events as the awards ceremony and now the World Voices Festival has come from many quarters, including the Palestine Festival of Literature, which, in an X (formerly Twitter) posting, says that the resistant writers have performed “an unprecedented act of solidarity with Palestinian writers.”

At the Washington Post, Sophia Nguyen writes that PEN America, while not canceling its annual fundraising gala, has put forward a “town hall event for members and former festival participants” that would be devised as “a way to ‘wrestle with the issues gripping the literary community and our own organization,'” according to PEN’s literary-programming lead, Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf.

But even amid the “fog of war” in the Gaza emergency, Publishing Perspectives readers and others in world book publishing are seeing increasing clarification on what a minefield “the trinity” of freedoms, as the International Publishers Association (IPA) knows them, must navigate.

Freedom of expression, freedom to publish, and the freedom to read, embrace underlying responsibilities of patience, transparency, and a willingness to recognize and respect gray areas of discussion, debate, and disagreement—if those freedoms’ full blessings are to be truly deployed.

A Programming Note: WEXFO 2024

On May 27, the first day of the two-day World Expression Forum (WEXFO) in Lillehammer, Publishing Perspectives will moderate an afternoon-length publishing-specific program titled Access to Information, Books, and Ideas: How to Advance the Freedom to Read.

Publishing Perspectives will moderate this event, with documentation to follow, in which speakers will explore how “politicians must look at the funding to support reading, not as funding something ‘nice to have,’ but as a pure necessity in the fight to uphold our democracies.”

Among the most serious conference-setting examinations of the gathering pressure on publishing to date, this event will bring together speakers including:

• Miha Kovač, co-author of the Ljubljana Manifesto of Higher Level Reading introduced in October during the Guest of Honor Slovenia programming that Kovač led at Frankfurter Buchmesse (read the manifesto here)
• Anne Mangen, a University of Stavanger professor in literacy at the Norwegian Reading Center
• Even Aleksander Hagen, the State Secretary in Norway’s Ministry of Culture and Equality
• Karine Pansa, International Publishers Association (IPA) president and managing partner at São Paulo’s Girassol Brasil Edições
• Tora Åsling, policy officer with the European and International Booksellers Federation (EIBF) in Brussels
• Mariann Schjeidem, secretary with IFLA’s Advisory Committee on Freedom of Access to Information and freedom of expression
• Laurie Halse Anderson, a National Coalition Against Censorship-honored author

Ticketing information and other details about the 2024 WEXFO, May 27 and 28, is here.

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More from Publishing Perspectives on book and publishing awards in the international industry is here, more on the PEN America Literary Awards is here, more on PEN America is here, and more on politics and world publishing is here.

More from Publishing Perspectives on issues of the freedom to publish and freedom of expression is here, more on the Prix Voltaire is here, and on the International Publishers Association is here. More on the World Expression Forum, WEXFO, is here, and more on the European and International Booksellers Federation is here. i

Publishing Perspectives is the world media partner of the International Publishers Association.