![](https://pen.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/PEN-Ten-Hero-Image-1920-×-640-px.png)
The PEN Ten Interview Series
The PEN Ten is on the pulse of literary culture to help you discover your next great read. In this interview series, we ask authors 10 questions about their latest work and art.
The PEN Ten with Lauren Beukes
"I joke that some people go to see psychologists, but I get my issues out on the page and make it my readers’ problem." More
The PEN Ten with Chaya Babu
"I think the responsibility of the writer is to interrogate their reality and the reality of what they see and then write that. I do believe there is collective… More
The PEN Ten with Brandon Caro
"In order for the world to function, we have to accept a certain level of falseness. It’s the responsibility of the writer to expose that falseness." More
The PEN Ten with Moustafa Bayoumi
"A writer’s “revolutionary duty,” as Gabriel García Márquez once put it, is 'to write well.' The responsibility of a human being, on the other hand, is to practice compassion… More
The PEN Ten with Robin Coste Lewis
"I have a responsibility to history to get out of the way and try as best I can to document what I see, even if it is internal, because… More
The PEN Ten with Adriana E. Ramírez
Adriana Ramírez is the winner of the inaugural PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize for her manuscript "Dead Boys," which takes an unflinching look at the bodies of those who have… More
The PEN Ten with Kelly Braffet
"So many of the awful things I see in the real world seem at their heart to stem from a failure of empathy, from an unwillingness to see those… More
The PEN Ten with Achy Obejas
"My most recurrent images involve water, and specifically, our rescue in the Straits of Florida when we escaped from Cuba: our small wooden fishing boat up against a giant… More
The PEN Ten with Rob Spillman
"I do believe there is a collective purpose to telling the stories that people know to be true, but that they have not yet been able to articulate, or… More
The PEN Ten with Andrew Malan Milward
"That’s one of the interesting ironies of being a writer: It’s something you do in isolation and yet it’s something that connects to and unites, not only other writers… More