The New Yorker Festival — Rushdie, Pamuk and Packer! Oh my!

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay and educated in England. His novels include “The Moor’s Last Sigh,” “The Satanic Verses,” “Shame,” “Shalimar the Clown,” and “Midnight’s Children,” which won the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Booker of Bookers Prize. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He has also written a nonfiction collection, “Step Across This Line,” and a children’s book, “Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” In June, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

Orhan Pamuk received the Nobel Prize in Literature last year. His work has been translated into more than forty languages, and he is Turkey’s best-selling novelist. His books include “The White Castle,” “The Black Book,” “The New Life,” “My Name Is Red,” “Snow,” and “Istanbul.” “Other Colors,” a collection of his essays, many of which first appeared in The New Yorker, is out in September. His most recent New Yorker essay, “Forbidden Fare,” about street food in Istanbul, appeared in the July 9th & 16th issue.

In 2005, The New Yorker Festival launched its inaugural Town Hall Meeting, which centered on the struggle for Iraq’s future. Two years later—with American troops still on the ground and a feckless Iraqi central government still in power, with widespread pessimism concerning both military and diplomatic progress, and with tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead and some two million Iraqi refugees spilling into neighboring countries—the progress of the war and the future of Iraq, as well as that of the larger Middle East, are more uncertain than ever. This year’s panel will address the most recent developments in the war and the options for the future now being considered.

With Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi, Jon Lee Anderson, David Kilcullen, and Phebe Marr. Moderated by George Packer.

Ali Abdul-Amir Allawi was born in Baghdad and spent many years in exile in England and the United States. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, he became Minister of Trade and Minister of Defense on the interim Iraqi Governing Council. In 2005, he was appointed Minister of Finance in the Iraqi transitional government, and the following year he left the government. He is the author of “The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace.”

Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer at The New Yorker, reports frequently from Iraq and Afghanistan. His article “The Taliban’s Opium War,” about the poppy-eradication campaign in Uruzgan Province, appeared in the July 9th & 16th issue. He is the author of “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life,” “The Fall of Baghdad,” and “The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan,” a collection of his pieces for the magazine.

David Kilcullen served for more than twenty years in the Australian Army and is the senior counter-insurgency adviser to General David Petraeus. He holds a doctorate in political anthropology and advocates the use of social science to combat the insurgency in Iraq. Part of the U.S. Army’s official counter-insurgency manual is based on his article “Countering Global Insurgency.” He was the subject of “Knowing the Enemy,” by George Packer, which appeared in The New Yorker last year.

Phebe Marr is a historian specializing in the Middle East and the author of “The Modern History of Iraq,” which she published in 1985 and revised in 2004. She has testified before both houses of Congress, and has served as a fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, and the United States Institute of Peace.

George Packer has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003. His article “The Lesson of Tal Afar,” which was published in the magazine last year, won the Overseas Press Club’s Ed Cunningham Award for the best magazine reporting from abroad. He is the author of “The Village of Waiting,” “Blood of the Liberals,” and “The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq,” for which he received this year’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.