The PEN Ten: An Interview with the 2021-2022 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellows
“You must be willing to get your pen dirty. Write with passion. Befriend an incarcerated person, learn how society formed that person, feel the connection you share with that… More
The PEN Ten: An Interview with Sunjeev Sahota
“Watching imagined people struggling through life in the imagined arena of a novel somehow allows me to live my life in a better, more self-aware way.” More
The PEN Pod: The Russian Key with Jeri Laber
“The human rights movement now is facing more problems than ever, and it’s more necessary than ever before. We have serious human rights problems in the United States.” More
The PEN Pod: Elevating Indigenous Authors with David Heska Wanbli Weiden
“I hope that the novel speaks not just to Native readers, but to folks who want to learn about voices that they may not be familiar with.” More
The PEN Pod: On Loose Ends and Plot Twists with Lisa Jewell
“The feeling of the book comes first. . . and then the bigger themes that encompass society and where we find ourselves now come much further down the line.” More
The PEN Pod: On Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary with Fredrik Backman
“I was going to try to write something about the things that everyday people go around carrying—that feeling that everybody else has their life figured out, except for me.” More
Arrested Zimbabwean Novelist Must Be Released
"Would that the regime cared as much about those issues as it does about silencing those who dare to raise their voices in dissent." More
The PEN Pod: Finding Hope in Endurance with Emily St. John Mandel
“This is something that our ancestors endured, and something that our descendants will endure, and our society. . . has endured through all of that.” More
The PEN Pod: Connecting through Translation with Ali Araghi
“One function of translation we could think about is the way it shows how literature of other cultures have reacted to similar problems we are dealing with.” More
The PEN Pod: Recalibrating Our Priorities with Ruchika Tomar
“The desire that I’m seeing for connection is really heartening, because what we’re doing as writers is responding to human experience.” More