This is WESA Arts, a weekly newsletter by Bill O'Driscoll providing in-depth reporting about the Pittsburgh area art scene. Sign up here to get it every Wednesday afternoon.
Caro Llewellyn has never lived in Pittsburgh; she’s Australian. But when she starts work Jan. 2 as the new executive director of City of Asylum, several things will be quite familiar.
For one, Llewellyn’s most recent day job was as executive director of the Wheeler Centre, in Melbourne. The Wheeler — formerly the Centre of Books, Writing and Ideas — resembles City of Asylum in its literary focus and the scope of its programming: Both groups put on 150 or so events each year.
And while the Wheeler doesn’t boast anything like COAP’s mission to shelter multiple writers persecuted in their home countries, its headquarters — in the State Library Victoria — nurtures the community by providing office space for other literary organizations.
Llewellyn, 58, led the Wheeler for three years. She left in July to pursue personal projects including a long-dormant novel.
Now the book’s done and awaiting publication next year, Llewellyn said. But there’s another connection that drew her to City of Asylum.
From 2006 to 2010, she was artistic director of the New York City-based PEN World Voices Festival, which presented writers from all over, from Annie Proulx to Nadine Gordimer and Orhan Pamuk. Llewellyn’s boss there was another fairly well-known author: acclaimed, Indian-born novelist Salman Rushdie, whose goal at PEN in the wake of 9/11 was to bring the world to New York.
And as it happens, it was also a talk by Rushdie that inspired Pittsburgh’s Henry Reese and Diane Samuels to launch City of Asylum, which they did way back in 2004. Rushdie was infamously the target of a 1989 assassination call by Iranian leader the Ayatollah Khomeini for his novel “The Satanic Verses”; he subsequently dedicated himself to aiding writers similarly threatened.
“It’s a lovely full circle to come back to do this work again,” said Llewellyn. (She remains friends with Rushdie, 76, who was badly injured in an August 2022 knife attack in Chautauqua, N.Y., where Reese was among those who shielded him from the attacker.)
Llewellyn’s career in literature has run the gamut, from doing publicity and marketing for publishers in New York City to running festivals in New York, Paris and Australia. One of her more high-profile gigs came in 2010, as executive producer of the New York Public Library’s centennial celebration. And she’s published books of her own, most recently “Diving Into Glass,” her acclaimed 2019 memoir about living with multiple sclerosis.
After a stint as experience and engagement director at Museums Victoria — Australia’s largest museums network — she signed on to the Wheeler Centre.
That was in 2020 — about four months into the global pandemic shutdown. Like most other arts groups, the Wheeler shifted to online and hybrid events. Caro’s Postcards from Abroad series offered interviews with names like Jonathan Franzen, Ruth Ozeki and Rushdie himself.
The Wheeler returned to live events in 2022, with online augmentation. Guests during Llewellyn’s tenure have ranged from Roxane Gay and Geraldine Brooks to Australian-rules football star Eddie Betts and filmmaker Jane Campion. She also partnered on programming with groups including the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Theater Company, the Immigration Museum, Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, and Blak & Bright First Nations Literary Festival.
Along with being one of Pittsburgh’s busiest arts presenters, City of Asylum stages all of its literary readings and other performances for free. That, too, should strike Llewellyn familiarly, given that under her leadership the Wheeler began offering “pay what you wish” and “no one turned away for lack of funds” pricing.
“Caro is an outstanding creative thinker and leader, and she has led the Wheeler Centre through an extraordinarily challenging period, including the rollercoaster of the pandemic and its aftermath,” said Wheeler Centre chair Kate Torney in a statement released when Llewellyn left the group. “Her optimism, creativity and dedication have been instrumental in ensuring that the Wheeler Centre emerged from this stronger than ever.”
Llewellyn has visited Alphabet City, City Asylum’s headquarters on the North Side, home to a small stage, the Alphabet City bookstore, and the 40 North bar and restaurant.
“It’s exciting. I love that combination of commerce and free programming,” she said.
The least familiar part of her new role might well be managing the seven houses City of Asylum operates on the North Side, each home to a persecuted writer. (Current occupants hail from Ukraine, Algeria, Sudan and Cuba.) She called this function “the heart of the job.”
Llewellyn said she admires City of Asylum’s programming, and hopes to bring to the group “a fresh lens” and her own set of international contacts. She likes the group’s blend of literary events and live music, epitomized by its signature annual Jazz Poetry Month. “It broadens the audience,” she said. “I think there’s so much synergy between music and literature.”
She said as someone living with MS (and who grew up with a father paralyzed by polio), she is keenly aware of issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. She said she is impressed by the diversity of City of Asylum’s programming, and even the diversity she saw in the audience here. But she added she wants “to see if there’s ways we can enhance that.”
Llewellyn and her husband, Maurizio Esposito, a chef by trade, arrive in Pittsburgh next week.
