“The Ukrainian-Russian Writers’ Tensions: Diplomatic Incident at PEN America World Voices Festival”

Columnist

Published on 05/25/2023 at 11:19
Reading time: 5 mins

FShould we boycott all Russian intellectuals and artists, even those who oppose Vladimir Putin? This is the line advocated by the Ukrainian government, wrote Emmanuel Grynszpan recently in The worldand it imposes “a thorny moral and political choice” on Western cultural institutions, called upon to choose their camp.

In mid-May, in New York, during the World Voices Festival of International Literature, the prestigious association PEN America thus found itself in turmoil when a round table of exiled Russian writers – and hostile to the war – hosted by Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, author of major and damning essays on Vladimir Putin. The cancellation came after protests from two Ukrainian writers (and fighters) who had been invited to another roundtable at the festival.

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