Arundhati Roy will deliver the Arthur Miller lecture at PEN America World Voices Festival (photo by Mayank Austen Soofi)
Who: Arundhati Roy, Siddhartha Deb
What: The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, PEN America World Voices Festival
Where: Apollo Theater, 253 West 125th St.
When: Sunday, May 12, $30-$65, 6:00
Why: The fifteenth annual PEN World Voices Festival comes to a close in New York City on May 12 with Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy delivering the prestigious Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture, the keynote event of the weeklong celebration of the written word, which seeks to “broaden channels of dialogue between the United States and the world.” The Indian screenwriter, essayist, novelist, and activist is the author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness; her collection of essays, My Seditious Heart, is coming out in June. She will be speaking about “the defense of the collective, of the individual, and of the land, in the face of the destructive logic of financial, social, religious, military, and governmental elites”; the talk will be followed by a Q&A with Indian writer and professor Siddhartha Deb. Among the other events this weekend are “Secrets and Lives” with Boris Kachka, Dani Shapiro, and Bridgett M. Davis, “The Art of Violence” with Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Tommy Orange, and Mohammed Hanif, “Women Uninterrupted” with Jennifer Egan, Inês Pedrosa, and Elif Shafak, and the free debate “A Question of Justice” at the Center for Social Innovation.