Blog
Filter By:
Advocacy • Analysis • Blog • Commentary • Drama • Essay • Event • Feature • Fiction • Graphic Narrative • Interview • Memoir • News • Obituary • Open Letter • Poetry • Press Release • Profile
Browse By Series:
PEN Poetry Series • Prison Writing • The PEN Ten Interviews • Illustrated PEN • Pen Pals • The PEN World
Browse By Email Subscription:
PEN America News • Educational Censorship News • Works of Justice
Luminescences of Words
When I was invited, a year and a half ago, to become president of the PEN American Center, I believe it was hoped I would prove enough of a… More
Pasha Malla and Moez Surani: Ethical Code for Writers According to Fifty People Who Are Not Writers
Ethical Code for Writers According to Fifty People Who Are Not WritersWe asked fifty people who do not consider themselves writers, young and old, from across Canada and beyond,… More
From the Floor: A Conversation with Grace Paley, Margaret Atwood, and Norman Mailer
We protest the state of the imagination of the PEN International Congress, 1986. We protest the underrepresentation of women on the panels and in the readings. Although nearly half… More
British Author Alan Shadrake Loses Appeal
PEN International renews its call for the charges against British author Alan Shadrake to be dropped after his six-week prison sentence for contempt was upheld by the Court of… More
A Reservoir of Freedom
We have come to the end of one of the most illustrious, unruly, and eventful congresses in the history of International PEN. Have so many brilliant writers ever gathered… More
On Writing
A young student once wrote to the French novelist André Gide to ask him whether he should try to become a writer. “Only if you have to,” answered Gide,… More
Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie & Others
There has never been much rapport between government and art in the United States. The thing was set up only, on the political level, to create a kind of… More
Photocopies of Photocopies: On Bao Ninh
Bao Ninh, now living in Hanoi, became a novelist in the second half of his life. Until the age of forty, he served in the North Vietnamese Army, fighting… More
Najat El Hachmi: The Little One
Mimoun would have been a normal man if his childhood hadn’t been plagued by so many unusual incidents, the first being the order in which he was born. If… More