This year's PEN World Voices Festival lineup includes Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, and more.
PEN America has announced highlights from the lineup for the PEN World Voices Festival 2020: These Truths. The festival will take place May 4-9 across New York City.
Margaret Atwood, Roxane Gay and Jia Tolentino will speak with Rebecca Traister to kick off the festival, Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, will deliver the keynote address, and—perhaps most intriguingly—there will be a closing musical performance by Jon Batiste, Suleika Jaouad, Zadie Smith, and Tara Westover. Groovy!
Other speakers include Jeremy O. Harris, Danez Smith, John Freeman, Elif Shafak, Lydia Davis, and Jeannette Winterson.
This year’s events celebrate “literature’s deep illumination of cultural, historical, political, and emotional truths in a complex moment when ‘truth’ is destabilized by the constant undermining of a common set of facts, ‘objective’ histories are being interrogated and upended, and radical candor about lived experiences is fueling powerful social movements.”
Take a look at more of the festival’s highlights here.
Jessie Gaynor
Jessie Gaynor is a senior editor at Lit Hub whose writing has appeared in McSweeney's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, The Glow was published by Random House in 2023. You can buy it here.
