I AM IN NEW YORK CITY FOR THE PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. The PEN organisation has campaigned tirelessly on behalf of writers facing persecution in their own countries — 20 years ago Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter travelled to Turkey to support dissident writers and their families. They were escorted on their travels by the young novelist Orhan Pamuk.

So it was fitting that Pamuk, who himself recently faced criminal charges relating to freedom of speech in Turkey, should deliver the opening lecture on the theme of this year's festival — “Faith and Reason”.

We are creating a world divided between faith-based fanaticism on the one hand, and amoral science and global market “logic” on the other. It is a dangerous and unhappy world, and one where many people feel powerless. What can literature do? Pamuk spoke of a writer’s contradictions — the way in which they must be able to enter into, and not just describe, situations and characters that they themselves find bewildering or unsympathetic.

This necessary conflict within the writer allows the reader to see beyond simple black and white situations. Such a conflict also forces new questions that, in turn, lead to new ways of seeing.

While the mass media tell us that a writer’s job is to entertain, a writer’s job is much more urgent than that. Writers who fear that they are surplus luxury goods forget how much can be changed when people start to think differently. Literature helps us to think differently.

If proof were needed that people are desperate for culture and ideas, then the fact that every PEN event was sold out before the festival opened should provide it New Yorkers want PEN and, judging from the website downloads, so does much of the rest of America. It is heartening that this is not the insular “homeland security” vision of George W. Bush, but an America that wants to hear world voices and to be in contact with different faiths, literatures, cultures, beliefs.

Salman Rushdie, introducing the festival, pointed out that — while the Bush Administration has done so much to isolate America — writers and artists can be the ones who reach out and who welcome in. PEN has brought together 135 writers from 33 countries for this festival. It is not about English-speaking white males but is a ferment of international creativity.

It feels as if Americans want much more of the world out there than either its Government or its media want them to have. The French are supporting this festival, and the message from the French Ambassador was simple: go into an American bookstore and you might find one book in a hundred translated from the French. (It’s a bit better in Britain, but not much.) Go into a French bookstore, and at least 35 per cent of what you see will be books translated from other languages — and not just from English. American, and indeed British publishers, I believe, could truly afford to be more adventurous.

Americans are being shortchanged by their inward-looking money-driven, media/ entertainment services, as culture now seems to be called in the mainstream US, and things are heading that way in Britain.

Globalisation may be dragging food across the world and creating clone cities wherever we go, but it is ruthlessly isolating culture. Culturally, we do not live in a cosmopolitan world — we live in a world supplied by Hollywood movies and blockbusters such as The Da Vinci Code. That makes sense to global capitalism, as does any blockbuster art exhibition, but we need to be able to find things for ourselves in our own way — and that means real bookshops with real choice.

Books must now compete against films, against television, against the internet — the noisy new media. Books are quieter, but we must still listen.

Literature is a place where you can always go and always be welcome. No one is shut out. It is truly global, in that it crosses all boundaries but does not seek to make everything and everyone the same.

Literature is about discovering difference. That is why it is so important, in our world now, that it be available. The internet is no substitute for a good bookshop where a real-life browser will always find something unexpected, and come away the better for it.

PEN celebrates literature, and underlines the urgent and necessary work that writers have to do in our society. This is not a call for drama-doc social realism, but a call to the imaginative life of the people of the world.

www.internationalpen.org.uk

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