Found in translation

To know a stranger is to read their story, says Caro Llewellyn, director of PEN World Voices.

PEN World Voices, the New York Festival of International Literature, was established in 2005 by Salman Rushdie as a forum for the literature of the rest of the world. Conceived by perhaps the world’s most controversial living writer, it is not surprising that this festival has become one of the most political events on the international literary circuit.

Over the course of the last four years, it has matured into a six-day festival featuring 160 writers. This year’s incarnation, themed “evolution/revolution”, was the most charged to date. It was conceived in response to a sense of crisis in the US, in the old sense of κρίσις or decisive turning-point, a period defined in equal parts by peril and hope.

Central to the festival’s evolution has been Caro Llewellyn, who, as director of the Sydney Writers’ Festival for four years, more than doubled attendance figures. More significantly, she gained an enviable reputation among the writers she worked with, and when PEN was seeking a permanent director for 2007, they received an influx of emails from authors around the world suggesting Llewellyn for the job. Adam Jasper spoke to Caro Llewellyn in New York about the highs and lows of running PEN World Voices.