The PEN World Voices Festival opens Wednesday April 29 and runs through Saturday May 2 with more than 140 writers from over 40 countries scheduled to appear across Greenwich Village in New York and a smaller program in Los Angeles. The festival has been running for two decades, growing out of an effort by Salman Rushdie and PEN America to expand American literary attention beyond the English language publishing world. The 2026 lineup is heavy on writers responding directly to political compression in their home countries, alongside a strong cohort of American fiction writers and a small but pointed translation focused track that anchors the back half of the schedule.
The headliners this year include Judith Butler, Cory Doctorow, Siri Hustvedt, Ha Jin, Molly Jong Fast, Katie Kitamura, Daniel Kehlmann, Laila Lalami, Megha Majumdar, Dinaw Mengestu, Bill McKibben, George Packer, Sarah Ruhl, Esmeralda Santiago, Neige Sinno, and Abdellah Taïa. The roster pulls writers working in seven or eight different languages, with many of the international guests appearing alongside their translators in panels designed to make the work of literary translation more visible than it normally is. The festival programs translation as a craft worth talking about rather than as invisible infrastructure.
The programming themes track closely with the political moment. Panels include conversations on dark academia as a literary response to institutional decay, the future of dystopian fiction, climate change as a fiction problem, border literature and migration narratives, and the protection of Black history under threat of erasure. Several sessions take up the question of what happens to literary discourse when major social platforms reduce the visibility of long form writing in favor of short form video. Other sessions look at the comic novel as a way through cultural darkness and the role of the graphic novel in engaging young readers. The mix is deliberate. PEN has been arguing for years that literature is a political act in the parts of the world where the act of writing is policed, and the 2026 schedule keeps that argument front and center.
The international writers on the schedule come from countries where the relationship between literature and the state is more openly contested than in the United States. Leila Aboulela works in Arabic and English from Sudan and Scotland. Agustina Bazterrica writes in Spanish from Argentina. Daniel Kehlmann publishes in German from Berlin and New York. Ha Jin writes in English about China. Abdellah Taïa works in French from Morocco. Each brings a publishing context that does not map cleanly onto the American conversation about freedom of expression. PEN has built the festival around the assumption that American readers benefit from sitting with that complexity rather than translating it into familiar US categories.
The American writers on the bill bring a different but related set of preoccupations. Judith Butler's session on philosophical writing in a moment of compression. Cory Doctorow on technology, monopoly, and creative labor. Siri Hustvedt on the novel as a form for thinking about consciousness. Megha Majumdar's debut and follow up novels have made her one of the most closely watched fiction writers under 40 working in English. Bill McKibben's climate writing has shifted into more openly activist territory over the last few years. Sarah Ruhl is reading from her recent work alongside several younger playwrights. The cumulative effect is a sense that American literary attention is broadening rather than narrowing.
The translation track is one of the festival's quietest and most useful features. PEN organizes panels each year that pair translated authors with their translators and program at least three working translators as featured guests in their own right. The work of bringing a book from Spanish or Arabic or Korean into English is not glamorous and not particularly well paid, but the festival treats translators as primary literary actors. That choice has helped raise the visibility of the field over the last decade. Several of the translators appearing this year have been at the festival before and have built their reputations partly through these public conversations.
For readers in New York and Los Angeles, the practical value of the festival is the chance to hear writers talk about the work in conversation rather than in isolation. Many of the panels are free or low cost and most do not require pre registration. The Greenwich Village programming concentrates around The Cooper Union, the New School, and several smaller venues that have hosted PEN events for years. The Los Angeles satellite programming is smaller but covers many of the same panels in condensed form. PEN livestreams selected sessions and posts archived video on its YouTube channel within a few weeks of the event, which means readers outside both cities can still access most of the programming.
The longer arc of the festival has been to push back against the assumption that English language literature is the center of the literary world. American publishing translates roughly three percent of new fiction and poetry titles each year, a number that has barely moved in two decades despite repeated industry initiatives. The festival treats that statistic as an embarrassment rather than a constraint. Each year of programming makes the case that the absence of translated literature in American bookstores is a publishing problem rather than a reader problem, and that American readers will absolutely show up for international fiction when it is given a credible platform.
The 2026 edition lands in a moment when American readers have more reasons than usual to want to hear from writers working outside the country. The conversations about technology, climate, migration, and political compression are happening in every major language right now. The festival is one of the few places in American cultural life where those conversations get to happen across languages and across borders in real time. The schedule, the venues, and the livestream links are at worldvoices.pen.org.