Great Writers on Free Speech and the Environment

The PEN Amer­i­can Cen­ter just wound up World Voic­es 2007, a con­fer­ence fea­tur­ing a slew of major authors, includ­ing Salman Rushdie, Don DeLil­lo, Neil Gaiman, and many more. One of the pan­els this year fea­tured some lit­er­ary heavy hit­ters read­ing works to raise aware­ness for envi­ron­men­tal issues: Bil­ly Collins, Jonathan Franzen, Moses Isegawa, Pico Iyer, Geert Mak, Mar­i­lynne Robin­son, Rox­ana Robin­son, Salman Rushdie, Gary Shteyn­gart, Janne Teller and Col­son White­head all par­tic­i­pat­ed (mp3).

The PEN orga­ni­za­tion works for lit­er­ary free­dom world­wide, and the con­fer­ence keynote (mp3) fea­tures Israeli author David Gross­man and Nobel Prize-win­ner Nadine Gordimer dis­cussing the “Free­dom to Write.” Con­sid­er­ing the news in Turkey these days, you may also want to give last year’s lec­ture with Orhan Pamuk and Mar­garet Atwood a lis­ten (mp3).

The Cen­ter also has an iTunes pod­cast series and an audio archive, but since the con­fer­ence just end­ed it will prob­a­bly take some time for them to process the lat­est audio. iTunes Feed Site

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