Fittingly, Ringwald would current the 2 translation awards of the night. I requested her ideas on the distinction between literary tradition in America and in different nations. In France, she mentioned, “the writers are far more like rock stars.”
“I really feel like individuals revere the entire TV-and-movies factor greater than books right here typically,” Dratch mentioned. Is she a giant reader?
“I used to learn on a regular basis, and I don’t know what occurred,” she mentioned.
“Telephones, that’s what occurred,” Ringwald replied.
“Telephones, and my dwindling consideration span,” Dratch mentioned. “However I don’t need to contribute to the demise of literature.”
All through the awards program, presenters and honorees together with Robert Jones Jr., Hafizah Augustus Geter, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, and Percival Everett (who obtained the evening’s high honor, the PEN/Jean Stein E-book Award) mentioned the literary traditions that knowledgeable their work, together with the affect they’ve seen.
In her acceptance speech, Fey—who has introduced on the Oscars of Oscars—mentioned “as a 52-year-old girl who’s been dwelling in New York and writing comedy for 30 years, there aren’t too many rooms anymore the place I really feel like a charlatan and a failure, however we discovered one! It’s tonight!”
PEN America president Ayad Akhtar appeared onstage with a reminder that free speech will not be absolute. “For the previous 100 years, we’ve labored to defend the rights of writers to think about, and communicate, and create freely,” Akhtar mentioned. “As we stay up for the subsequent hundred years, our mission is fueled by new urgency. Alarming makes an attempt to make use of the facility of the state to ban concepts, and the books that include them, have proliferated on this nation, and we’re additionally battling a dwindling area of civil trade—and a rising perception on all sides of the political spectrum, that the potential harms of speech maintain an equal and even larger declare on us than the liberty to talk.”
Rosaz Shariyf, who organized the occasion, believes “there’s no different present like this, bringing collectively such an enormous cross part of the writing and publishing worlds and honoring writers as the celebs they’re,” she mentioned. The evening was “stuffed with glamour and laughter, balanced with a deep reverence for the shape and its capacity to ask and elucidate a few of our society’s greatest, most pressing questions—and to attach us to 1 one other because it does.”
