Early last week, I persuaded PEN World Voices director Caro Llewellyn to ditch the last-minute scheduling and meet me for tea at Housing Works to discuss how her first festival here—after several highly successful years running the Sydney Writers Festival—was coming together. “I’d hate to say that I pulled this together,” she emphasized when discussing the six months of planning that went into World Voices, which kicks off tomorrow night. “It’s very much a joint effort.” And though the scale at which she’s operating has been somewhat reduced—World Voices drew approximately 10,000 visitors in 2006, while Llewellyn’s last festival in Sydney had a total audience of 65,000—”it doesn’t feel scaled down by any means.” (She also points out that it’s a lot easier to get international writers to come to New York City than to persuade them to take a 20-hour flight to Australia.)
Despite the constant stream of literary events in New York City, Llewellyn believes there’s a real need and desire for an extended festival such as World Voices. “People who say we already have enough literary events in New York don’t apply the same logic to film festivals,” she laughs. So will she have time this week to see any of the events she’s helped organize? “I don’t know what I’m going to be able to see this year,” she admits, although she’s using a trick she learned in Sydney to get to at least one panel… by moderating it herself Sunday afternoon, after which she’ll try to make it downtown in time to hear Israeli writer David Grossman‘s festival-closing lecture.