2023 PEN World Voices Festival: OTTESSA MOSHFEGH PRESENTS: WHY WRITE?

Beyond the publishing industry’s tireless work catering toward a market in flux, the landscape of culture, social politics, and online discourse shifts faster than novelists can write. How do writers keep up, stay relevant? Or does relevance or salability as defined by an industry’s market response to social movements even have an effect on how writers write or should write? Ottessa Moshfegh speaks with three very different novelists—Rachel Kushner (The Mars Room, Flamethrowers), Min Jin Lee (Pachinko, Free Food for Millionaires), and Akhil Sharma (Family Life, A Life of Adventure and Delight)—to discuss why they write, how they want their readers to read, and what responsibility they feel, if any, to promote or respond to the moral discourse of the day.