Writer to engage Hillary Clinton at 2018 PEN World Voices Festival

Clinton will be delivering the 12th Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture on April 22, 2018, with a dialogue about the future of women and girls around the world. Adichie herself delivered this in 2015.

Themed “Resist and Reimagine,” the 2018 PEN World Voices Festival will feature “more than 165 writers of over 50 nationalities” from April 16–22. Clinton’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture will be given at the Great Hall at Cooper Union in Manhattan.

According to PEN,

"At a time of unprecedented threats to free speech, open discourse, and the rights of historically marginalized groups, Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton will draw on her time as the nation’s top diplomat and her career in politics to underline the centrality of free speech — broadly defined and vociferously defended — in sustaining healthy democracies and vibrant societies. Secretary Clinton has shown a life-long commitment to amplifying lesser-heard voices and buttressing safeguards for free expression.

Following the lecture, celebrated Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah, and We Should All Be Feminists, among others), a champion of unheard stories, and a feminist will engage Clinton in conversation. This dialogue between two strong advocates for women and girls—one from politics and diplomacy, the other from world literature—promises unique insights into how we might imagine a better future for women and girls around the world."

Before Adichie in 2015, Wole Soyinka had been invited to deliver the sixth Lecture in 2011.

Other Lecturers have included novelists Orhan Pamuk and Salman Rushdie, and the feminist Roxane Gay last year. After her own Lecture, Adichie had been in conversation with PEN American Center president Andrew Solomon.