$10
The PEN Festival: War
Sat., May 01, 2010 / 3:30 PM
Audio / Video
Gallery
About This Event
Minimum Age:
All AgesDoors Open:
3:30 PMShow Time:
3:30 PMDescription:
War writing is an act of witness. It seeks to bring from the battlefront a way of
connecting readers to an experience said to defy the power of words. Join these
extraordinary journalists, who put themselves on the front line so we can know
the terrible truths behind the headlines, for a discussion about the difficulties
reporting the devastating facts of war. Deborah Amos is an award-winning
correspondent who reported on the Gullf War in 1991, and more recently, Iraq
for NPR. Philip Gourevitch has reported on the genocide in Rwanda, and Arnon
Grunberg has made numerous trips to Iraq from where he has recently returned.
The Humvee Sebastian Junger was riding in was hit by a land mine when he was
in Afghanistan working on his forthcoming book War and the award-winning
documentary Restrepo, and Daniele Mastrogiacomo’s ordeal of being kidnapped
and held hostage is every journalist’s worst nightmare.
PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature: A week-long celebration of books and writing from around the globe, featuring 130 writers from 40 different countries. Don't miss this exciting cross-cultural literary exchange including conversations, panel discussions, readings, a translation slam, and an all-star Cabaret! New York City, April 26-May 2, 2010. <www.pen.org/festival>
This is a first come seated event. Seating is limited and not guaranteed; please arrive early.
Tickets are $10, or $8 for PEN Members
PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature: A week-long celebration of books and writing from around the globe, featuring 130 writers from 40 different countries. Don't miss this exciting cross-cultural literary exchange including conversations, panel discussions, readings, a translation slam, and an all-star Cabaret! New York City, April 26-May 2, 2010. <www.pen.org/festival>
This is a first come seated event. Seating is limited and not guaranteed; please arrive early.
Tickets are $10, or $8 for PEN Members
Artists
Deborah Amos
Deborah Amos covers Iraq for NPR News. Her reports can be heard on NPR's award-winning Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. She has returned to work with NPR after a decade in television news, including ABC's Nightline and World News Tonight and the PBS programs NOW with Bill Moyers and Frontline.
Prior to her work with ABC News, Amos spent 16 years with NPR, where she was most recently the London Bureau Chief. Previously she was based in Amman, Jordan, as an NPR foreign correspondent. Amos won several awards, including an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award and a Breakthru Award, and widespread recognition for her coverage of the Gulf War in 1991. She spent 1991-92 as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and is the author of Lines in the Sand: Desert Storm and the Remaking of the Arab World (Simon and Schuster, 1992).
She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Amos joined NPR in 1977, where she was first a director and then a producer for Weekend All Things Considered until 1979, after which she worked on documentaries until 1985. In 1982, she received the Prix Italia, the Ohio State Award, and a duPont-Columbia Award for "Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown;" and in 1984 she received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for "Refugees."
Amos began her career after receiving a degree in broadcasting from the University of Florida at Gainesville.
Prior to her work with ABC News, Amos spent 16 years with NPR, where she was most recently the London Bureau Chief. Previously she was based in Amman, Jordan, as an NPR foreign correspondent. Amos won several awards, including an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award and a Breakthru Award, and widespread recognition for her coverage of the Gulf War in 1991. She spent 1991-92 as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and is the author of Lines in the Sand: Desert Storm and the Remaking of the Arab World (Simon and Schuster, 1992).
She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Amos joined NPR in 1977, where she was first a director and then a producer for Weekend All Things Considered until 1979, after which she worked on documentaries until 1985. In 1982, she received the Prix Italia, the Ohio State Award, and a duPont-Columbia Award for "Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown;" and in 1984 she received a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for "Refugees."
Amos began her career after receiving a degree in broadcasting from the University of Florida at Gainesville.
Philip Gourevitch
Philip Gourevitch (born 1961), an American author and journalist, is the editor of The Paris Review and a longtime staff writer of The New Yorker. His most recent book is The Ballad of Abu Ghraib, an account of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison under the American occupation, which was originally published as Standard Operating Procedure. Gourevitch has written on a variety of subjects -- from ethnic conflicts in Africa, Europe and Asia to political corruption in Rhode Island and the music of James Brown. He became widely known for his first book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, which tells the story of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.
Arnon Grunberg
Author Arnon Yasha Yves Grunberg was born in Amsterdam in 1971.
He currently lives in New York.
Grunberg was kicked out of high school at age seventeen. He started his own publishing company called Kasimir, specializing in non-Aryan German literature, at the age of nineteen, acted and wrote plays. When he was only twenty-three years old, his first novel Blue Mondays became a bestseller in Europe and won the Anton Wachter Prize. It has been translated in thirteen languages.
His novel Silent Extras was published in 1997 and has sold more than 100,000 copies.
In 1998 he wrote the novel Saint Anthony for the Dutch “Week of the Books”. 701,000 copies were published. His collection of essays entitled The Comfort of Slapstick was published the same year.
His first screenplay, The Fourteenth Chicken, was released as a movie in the fall of 1998, coinciding with the premiere of You Are Also Very Attractive When You Are Dead, a play Grunberg wrote for German and Israeli actors and which has been performed in Düsseldorf and Tel Aviv.
Grunberg’s novel Phantom Pain was published in 2000 and went on to win the AKO Prize, the Dutch equivalent of the Booker. The English translation of this novel was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2005.
Grunberg was commissioned by the city of Rotterdam and the publishing house Athenaeum-Polak & van Gennep to write a contemporary version of Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly. This book, In Praise of Mankind, came out in 2001 and won the Golden Owl Award for the best book a year later. 2001 also saw the publication of Amuse-Bouche, a collection of his short stories.
Under the name Marek van der Jagt, Grunberg wrote the novel The Story of My Baldness, for which he won for the second time the Anton Wachter Prize, a prize for the best debut novel. He became the first novelist in the history of this prize to have won it twice. The Story of My Baldness won the Aspekte Prize in Germany.
Again under the name Marek van der Jagt, in 2002, Grunberg published the essay Monogamous, the essay chosen that year for the “Week of the Books”. Another Marek van der Jagt work, the novel Gstaad 95-98, was published in 2002 and was introduced by Arnon Grunberg in Vienna.
In 2002 Grunberg won the German NRW Literature Prize for all his books translated into German, including those by Marek van der Jagt.
In 2003 his novel The Asylum Seeker was published in the Netherlands and hailed as his best novel to date.
In 2004 he published a collection of short stories, Grunberg Around the World, and a novella, Monkey Grabbing Hold of Happines. September 2004 his novel The Jewish Messiah was published.
In 2004 he won the prestigious Bordewijk Prize for The Asylum Seeker. Also he won for this novel for the second time the AKO Prize. Grunberg is the only author till now to win this prize twice.
From September 2004 till November 2005 he was the anchorman for the weekly Dutch cultural TV show R.A.M.
In 2005 The Jewish Messiah was on the shortlist of both the Golden Owl and the AKO Prize. In the spring of 2005 he gave a masterclass at the Technical University in Delft, the Netherlands, on “the technique of suffering”. Fall 2005 The Technique of Suffering was published. The book contains his lectures and a description of the machines that the students built under his supervision.
Also in 2005 The Grunberg Bible was published, the best from the Old and the New Testament according to Grunberg.
In the same year he edited a collection of stories from Eastern Europe, Fear Defeats Everything.
In September 2006 his novel Tirza was published. With this novel he won his second Golden Owl Award and the Libris Prize. It has sold more than 300,000 copies.
Because I Desire You, a collection of letters, was published in 2007.
His novel Our Uncle was published in September 2008.
A collection of reports from 2006 till 2008, Chambermaids and Soldiers, was published early 2009.
In the autumn of 2009 The Betrayal of the Text was published, a collection of Grunberg's reading about war and truth, during his guest lectureship at Leiden University, as well as essays and short stories of his students.
In December 2009 Grunberg received the Constantijn Huygens Prize for his complete oeuvre.
Grunberg's work has been translated into twenty-three different languages.
He writes columns (1995-1996: Letter from America, 1996-1997: Every Day Swordfish, 1997-2006: Grunberg Around the World and in 2006 Grunberg Among the People started), book reviews and essays for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, a weekly column for the Belgian magazine Humo (The Mailbox of Arnon Grunberg), the magazine VPRO Gids, the magazine Vrij Nederland (Grunberg Helps), and a monthly column for Wordt Vervolgd, the Dutch magazine of Amnesty International. Every week Grunberg reads a story in the radio program De Avonden. Regularly he publishes essays and stories in literary magazines Hollands Maandblad and De Gids. Grunberg also writes a blog for the online literary magazine Words Without Borders. He contributed to The New York Times, L'espresso, Internazionale, Aftonbladet, Tages-Anzeiger, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt, Die Zeit, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, SonntagsZeitung, Libération, Courrier International, Culture + Travel, Salon.com, n+1 Magazine and Bookforum.
Grunberg was kicked out of high school at age seventeen. He started his own publishing company called Kasimir, specializing in non-Aryan German literature, at the age of nineteen, acted and wrote plays. When he was only twenty-three years old, his first novel Blue Mondays became a bestseller in Europe and won the Anton Wachter Prize. It has been translated in thirteen languages.
His novel Silent Extras was published in 1997 and has sold more than 100,000 copies.
In 1998 he wrote the novel Saint Anthony for the Dutch “Week of the Books”. 701,000 copies were published. His collection of essays entitled The Comfort of Slapstick was published the same year.
His first screenplay, The Fourteenth Chicken, was released as a movie in the fall of 1998, coinciding with the premiere of You Are Also Very Attractive When You Are Dead, a play Grunberg wrote for German and Israeli actors and which has been performed in Düsseldorf and Tel Aviv.
Grunberg’s novel Phantom Pain was published in 2000 and went on to win the AKO Prize, the Dutch equivalent of the Booker. The English translation of this novel was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2005.
Grunberg was commissioned by the city of Rotterdam and the publishing house Athenaeum-Polak & van Gennep to write a contemporary version of Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly. This book, In Praise of Mankind, came out in 2001 and won the Golden Owl Award for the best book a year later. 2001 also saw the publication of Amuse-Bouche, a collection of his short stories.
Under the name Marek van der Jagt, Grunberg wrote the novel The Story of My Baldness, for which he won for the second time the Anton Wachter Prize, a prize for the best debut novel. He became the first novelist in the history of this prize to have won it twice. The Story of My Baldness won the Aspekte Prize in Germany.
Again under the name Marek van der Jagt, in 2002, Grunberg published the essay Monogamous, the essay chosen that year for the “Week of the Books”. Another Marek van der Jagt work, the novel Gstaad 95-98, was published in 2002 and was introduced by Arnon Grunberg in Vienna.
In 2002 Grunberg won the German NRW Literature Prize for all his books translated into German, including those by Marek van der Jagt.
In 2003 his novel The Asylum Seeker was published in the Netherlands and hailed as his best novel to date.
In 2004 he published a collection of short stories, Grunberg Around the World, and a novella, Monkey Grabbing Hold of Happines. September 2004 his novel The Jewish Messiah was published.
In 2004 he won the prestigious Bordewijk Prize for The Asylum Seeker. Also he won for this novel for the second time the AKO Prize. Grunberg is the only author till now to win this prize twice.
From September 2004 till November 2005 he was the anchorman for the weekly Dutch cultural TV show R.A.M.
In 2005 The Jewish Messiah was on the shortlist of both the Golden Owl and the AKO Prize. In the spring of 2005 he gave a masterclass at the Technical University in Delft, the Netherlands, on “the technique of suffering”. Fall 2005 The Technique of Suffering was published. The book contains his lectures and a description of the machines that the students built under his supervision.
Also in 2005 The Grunberg Bible was published, the best from the Old and the New Testament according to Grunberg.
In the same year he edited a collection of stories from Eastern Europe, Fear Defeats Everything.
In September 2006 his novel Tirza was published. With this novel he won his second Golden Owl Award and the Libris Prize. It has sold more than 300,000 copies.
Because I Desire You, a collection of letters, was published in 2007.
His novel Our Uncle was published in September 2008.
A collection of reports from 2006 till 2008, Chambermaids and Soldiers, was published early 2009.
In the autumn of 2009 The Betrayal of the Text was published, a collection of Grunberg's reading about war and truth, during his guest lectureship at Leiden University, as well as essays and short stories of his students.
In December 2009 Grunberg received the Constantijn Huygens Prize for his complete oeuvre.
Grunberg's work has been translated into twenty-three different languages.
He writes columns (1995-1996: Letter from America, 1996-1997: Every Day Swordfish, 1997-2006: Grunberg Around the World and in 2006 Grunberg Among the People started), book reviews and essays for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, a weekly column for the Belgian magazine Humo (The Mailbox of Arnon Grunberg), the magazine VPRO Gids, the magazine Vrij Nederland (Grunberg Helps), and a monthly column for Wordt Vervolgd, the Dutch magazine of Amnesty International. Every week Grunberg reads a story in the radio program De Avonden. Regularly he publishes essays and stories in literary magazines Hollands Maandblad and De Gids. Grunberg also writes a blog for the online literary magazine Words Without Borders. He contributed to The New York Times, L'espresso, Internazionale, Aftonbladet, Tages-Anzeiger, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt, Die Zeit, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, SonntagsZeitung, Libération, Courrier International, Culture + Travel, Salon.com, n+1 Magazine and Bookforum.
Sebastian Junger
Sebastian Junger (born January 17, 1962 in Belmont, Massachusetts) is an American author, journalist, and documentary filmmaker, most famous for the best-selling book The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea. He graduated from Concord Academy in 1980 and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan University in cultural anthropology in 1984. He received a National Magazine Award in 2000 for "The Forensics of War," published in Vanity Fair in 1999. In 1997, with the publication of his work, The Perfect Storm, he was touted as a new Hemingway, and helped usher a renewed interest in adventure non-fiction. At the Sundance Film Festival in 2010, Junger's documentary feature Restrepo won the Grand Jury Prize for a domestic documentary.
Daniele Mastrogiacomo
Daniele Mastrogiacomo (born on 30 September 1954) is an Italian-Swiss journalist and a war correspondent for la Repubblica newspaper.
He was born in Karachi, Pakistan. An expert in foreign politics, he began working for la Repubblica in 1980 and has been a special international reporter since 1992. Mastrogiacomo reported on events such as police operation Mani Pulite, the Marta Russo murder and the Priebke affair. He has worked in Afghanistan, Iran, the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Somalia. In 2006 he reported on the Lebanon war.
On 5 March 2007, Mastrogiacomo along with Afghan journalist, Ajmal Naqshbandi, and an Afghan driver, Sayed Agha, was on his way to Taliban controlled southern Afghanistan when they were kidnapped.
The Taliban eventually freed Mastrogiacomo in exchange for the release of five Taliban prisoners (including Dadullah's brother Mullah Shah Mansoor and other Taliban commanders), and he returned to his country on 20 March.
He was born in Karachi, Pakistan. An expert in foreign politics, he began working for la Repubblica in 1980 and has been a special international reporter since 1992. Mastrogiacomo reported on events such as police operation Mani Pulite, the Marta Russo murder and the Priebke affair. He has worked in Afghanistan, Iran, the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Somalia. In 2006 he reported on the Lebanon war.
On 5 March 2007, Mastrogiacomo along with Afghan journalist, Ajmal Naqshbandi, and an Afghan driver, Sayed Agha, was on his way to Taliban controlled southern Afghanistan when they were kidnapped.
The Taliban eventually freed Mastrogiacomo in exchange for the release of five Taliban prisoners (including Dadullah's brother Mullah Shah Mansoor and other Taliban commanders), and he returned to his country on 20 March.