This event is part of the 2021 PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. Visit pen.org/festival to learn more and get tickets for other events.

FLASH SALE EXTENDED: For a limited time only, enter the code FLASH21WVF at checkout to receive 25 percent off. PEN America Members get a full 50 percent off.

Across his career, Tasmanian novelist and Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan has unearthed histories that are crucial to remember to avoid repeating. He has built a canon that explores the realities of outsider characters—immigrants and displaced convicts, forced laborers, accused terrorists, and aboriginal guides at risk for erasure—whose worlds are threatened by the political and environmental catastrophes that define our age and stretch back to the horrors of the past. His latest work, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, is no exception. Here, a family’s otherworldly vanishing allegorically mirrors the wildfires that have so recently scorched the face of Australia beyond recognition. The Guardian writes of this “magical realist tale of ecological anguish”: “Writers the world over are grappling with a version of this question: in the face of so much devastation, so much terror, what can fiction possibly achieve? The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is his emphatic, wrenching answer.”

Flanagan closes this year’s festival with the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, delivering a profound meditation on the contagiousness of fear, the potentials and limits of literature to incite moral reckoning, and new, insidious modes of censorship that pose critical challenges to free expression. He will be joined in conversation by Alexandra Schwartz, an award-winning writer on arts and culture for The New Yorker.

This digital event will start at 8pm ET / 5pm PT. If you have any questions, please visit our FAQs.

Presented in collaboration with Scuppernong Books.

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Richard Flanagan is a Tasmanian novelist whose books have received numerous honors and are published in 42 countries. He won the Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. His latest novel is The Living Sea of Waking Dreams.

Alexandra Schwartz is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

ABOUT THE ARTHUR MILLER FREEDOM TO WRITE LECTURE

The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture is the culminating event of our Festival. Flanagan closes this week of literary celebration with a profound meditation on the contagiousness of fear, the limits of literature to incite moral reckoning, and the new, insidious modes of censorship that pose critical challenges to free expression today.

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The 2021 PEN World Voices Festival convenes fiction and nonfiction writers, poets, translators, thinkers, and activists to honor the art of the possible and the power of storytelling to push boundaries, challenge inherited narratives, and give voice to hope, courage, and survival. In a year when division and bloodshed have been fueled by hatreds based on race, ethnicity, and religion, the Festival celebrates resilience and courage, and summons the powers of the radical imagination and literature as gateways to reckoning and reconciliation.

We thank our sponsors for their generous support in making this year’s Festival possible.

Presenting Sponsors

Amazon Crossing • Amazon Literary Partnership • Institut Ramon Llull • Japan Foundation, Los Angeles • JKW Foundation • New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment • National Endowment for the Arts • New York State Council on the Arts • New York City Department of Cultural Affairs • Vilcek Foundation

Media Partners

Hudson Booksellers • The New Republic • The Paris Review

Community & Regional Partners

Asian American Writers Workshop • Austin Library Foundation • Community of Literary Magazines & Presses (CLMP) • Dallas Literary Festival • Harriman Institute at Columbia University • Kenning Editions • Magic City Poetry Festival • Miami Book Fair • National Queer Theater • Narrative 4 • New York Immigration Coalition • New York Theatre Workshop • Nuyorican Poets Cafe • OPEN DOORS • Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) • The Mexican Studies Institute at the City University of New York (CUNY) • Word Alliance