The PEN Ten with Lawrence Venuti
The translator ... bears an enormous responsibility, not just in relation to the source text, but in representing a foreign culture. Translations can create or strengthen stereotypes of foreign… More
The PEN Ten with Roxana Robinson
What the writer does is bear witness: we tell the stories of the things that disturb us most, and we try to tell them in the way that will… More
The PEN Ten with Je Banach
Writing may be courageous, but reading and speaking about what we read are also courageous acts. The discourse we create when we talk about books is daring just as… More
The PEN Ten with Jimmy Santiago Baca
What is the responsibility of the writer? To toss out like old rotten salad the yearning for fame and money and get busy fighting for human rights and protesting… More
The PEN Ten with Monique Truong
Writers or rather our works begin the conversations about the difficult, unanswerable subjects of life, and often our works keep the conversations going when everyone else would rather forget.… More
The PEN Ten with Alexander Chee
At some point recently I realized I mostly read about assassins. Assassins and sex work—in particular, I'm fascinated by the new porn narratives, the way porn has moved on… More
The PEN Ten with Karen Emmerich
The writer might have no responsibilities whatsoever, but the translator has only responsibilities—or at least that’s the popular perception. That’s why we’re always failing—according, again, to the popular perception.… More
The PEN Ten with Roxane Gay
Do writers have a collective purpose? I'm not sure, but what we do is write the world as we see it. We witness and record and remember and when… More
The PEN Ten with Shya Scanlon
Unfortunately, too little progress has been made, globally, since Solzhenitsyn smuggled his Nobel acceptance speech out of the Soviet Union as negatives in a tape deck in 1970. Even… More
The PEN Ten with Alissa Nutting
"I think writing should be a sacrifice, and feel like one—how else could the act of constructing narratives, stories, lies, deceptions, ever be kept honest, if not through demanding… More
Alert Us
To any writer artist who is at risk, or is in need of assistance, including those denied entry into the U.S. as a result of the latest Trump Administration travel ban. 
