Neil Gaiman, Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel are among the writers who have agreed to be table hosts at this week’s PEN American Center gala after six authors withdrew in protest of an award being given to the satirical French publication Charlie Hebdo. The literary and human-rights organization said the other new hosts are George Packer, Azar Mafisi and Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese-born French author who will present the award to Hebdo’s editor-in-chief Gerard Biard and critic and essayist Jean-Baptiste Thore. The center is giving the magazine a Freedom of Expression Courage award, a decision that has been fiercely defended and criticized. “I was honored to be invited to host a table,” Gaiman wrote in an email Sunday to The Associated Press. “The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are getting an award for courage: They continued putting out their magazine after the offices were firebombed, and the survivors have continued following the murders.” The literary world has been in a war of words since the center announced that Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose and four other table hosts withdrew from the gala, citing what they say are the offensive cartoons of Muslims in Charlie Hebdo. PEN center officials, including organization President Andrew Solomon, have said the award is not for the magazine’s content, while also praising satire as a valid and valuable form of social criticism. The Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo were the scene of a January shooting that left 12 dead. Gaiman said he was puzzled that “several otherwise well-meaning writers have failed to grasp that you do not have to like what is said to support people’s right to say it.” The gala is the centerpiece of the PEN center’s annual World Voices Festival. Those receiving awards include playwright Tom Stoppard, Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova and Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle.
Filmmaker Roman Polanski received a film award and pressed his palms into plaster for the hall of independent cinema stars in Krakow — the same Polish city where a court is weighing a U.S. request for his extradition. Polanski attended the opening late Friday of the 8th edition of the PKO Off Camera film festival and was awarded the Against the Current award for independence in art. Polanski, who spent his childhood in Krakow, jokingly said he was happy to be awarded there “at long last.” In February, the Oscar-winning director appeared in a Krakow court for a hearing related to a U.S. request for his extradition concerning charges of sex with a minor, a case that has haunted him since 1977.