Filipino in PEN World Voices Festival in New York

MANILA, Philippines – Distinguished writer and UP professor Jose “Butch” Dalisay Jr. was the first Filipino to participate in the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, a gathering of about 160 writers from more than 50 countries, from April 27 to May 3 in New York.

Other celebrity writers invited to the 5th PEN festival included the Nobel laureate Salman Rushdie, winner of the French Prix Médicis and the Scotiabank Giller Prize Michael Ondaatje, winner of the North-South Prize given by the Council of Europe Nawal El Saadawi, and the Golden-Globe winner, actor/director/ screen writer James Franco. Dalisay described these writers as “formidable and formidably talented” artists.

The festival focused on the theme of “Evolution/Revolution,” i.e., the political, social, and economic changes taking place around the world and their impact on literature as well as the impact of literature on societies and governments at large.

In one festival event, “Prison Deform,” writers who had spent time in prison – Hwang Sok-yong, Khet Mar, Susan Rosenberg, and Dalisay – talked about how that experience helped shape their writing. They agreed that “writing and writing well was the best revenge.”

Dalisay, who heads the University of the Philippines’ Institute of Creative Writing and who also served as UP vice president for public affairs and chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, was also one of the nine featured readers in the festival’s main reading, held at the Great Hall of Cooper Union. He read a passage from his new novel, Soledad’s Sister. The novel was short-listed for the first Man Asia Literary Prize in 2007, Asia’s counterpart of the Man Booker Prize.

He also read a poem at the “Defiance” event at Joe’s Pub. Dalisay chose a dramatic monologue from Alfredo Navarro Salanga’s Turtle Voices in Uncertain Weather, which he felt represented Philippine literature “at its defiant best.”

Dalisay says that he “was happy to have come and given voice to our literature, still so little seen and heard even in the world’s largest literary marketplace” (a shortcoming that, among others, Miguel Syujuco’s ‘Ilustrado’ should soon help to redress.”