The evening was opened by PEN America president Andrew Solomon, who said that PEN and the festival’s role was “to ensure many voices from many places can be heard”. But in recent years PEN has had some trouble smoothing out conflicts among its membership, usually ones which reflect the fault lines of global politics.

At the beginning of this month, when PEN’s program acceptance of sponsorship from the Israeli government for the writer Dalia Betolin-Sherman and playwright Yael Ronen resulted in the online publication of an open letter signed by over 100 PEN American Center members including Alice Walker and Junot Diaz.