English PEN is the London-based centre of PEN International, the worldwide association of writers, and one of the world's first non-governmental organisations dedicated to defending freedom of expression. Founded in 1921, it was the founding centre of the global PEN movement and today campaigns for writers at risk, champions literature in translation, and runs high-profile programmes and prizes that celebrate literary courage. With a membership community of more than 1,000 writers, editors, publishers, translators and readers, English PEN describes its vision as a world with free expression and equity of opportunity for all.
Founding in 1921
English PEN was founded by the novelist Catherine Amy Dawson Scott, who believed writers needed a common meeting ground where they could connect across national borders. Its inaugural meeting was held at the Florence Restaurant in Soho on 5 October 1921, at which John Galsworthy, the future Nobel laureate, was appointed as its first president. Forty-one writers attended that Foundation Dinner alongside Dawson Scott and her daughter Marjorie, and all joined the new club as Foundation Members. Among them were figures such as Austin Harrison, F. Tennyson Jesse, May Sinclair and Rebecca West. The acronym behind the P.E.N. Club, as it was then known, stood for Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists, and Dawson Scott's hope was to create a meeting ground for writers in every country. Her ambition was swiftly realised: within three years there were nineteen PEN clubs around the world.
The First PEN Congress and the Charter
The first meeting of what would become the annual PEN Congress was held in London in May 1923, attended by representatives from eleven countries. As the movement grew, it became necessary to establish guiding principles, and the first version of the PEN Charter was passed at the 1927 Congress in Brussels. The Charter declared that literature knows no frontiers and must remain a common currency among people in spite of political or national upheavals — words that would echo through PEN's work for more than a century. In 1940, English PEN published its "Appeal to the Conscience of the World", a plea for the protection of freedom of expression written by its first woman president, Storm Jameson, and co-signed by prominent English writers including Vita Sackville-West, E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, Vera Brittain and Rebecca West.
Post-War Human Rights Work
Following the Second World War, English PEN played a significant role in the emerging global discourse around human rights, and was the first organisation to frame freedom of expression as a necessary precondition for literary creation. PEN International gained advisory status to the United Nations and worked with UNESCO on various initiatives, while new centres continued to open across the world. English PEN kept up its defence of imprisoned writers, writers in exile and censored writers through the Cold War decades and beyond. The Charter itself has been amended only rarely; at the 83rd PEN Congress in Lviv in 2017, Article 3 was broadened for the first time since its adoption, committing PEN members to dispel all types of hate — not only on grounds of race, class or nationality but also gender, religion and other categories of identity — and to support the ideal of a unified humanity living in peace.
The Centenary in 2021
English PEN celebrated its centenary in 2021, one hundred years after that first dinner in Soho. The centenary programme, titled "Common Currency" after the words of the PEN Charter, included events, residencies and workshops held online and across the United Kingdom, culminating in a three-day festival of free thinking at London's Southbank Centre in September 2021. The centenary also gave fresh prominence to the organisation's archives: a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded project at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin digitised nearly 5,000 records from the archives of PEN International and English PEN, creating new online research resources and teaching guides for students and scholars of human rights and literary history.
The Writers at Risk Programme
English PEN's Writers at Risk Programme, founded in 1960 as the Writers in Prison Committee, is one of the world's longest-running campaigns for freedom of expression. It campaigns on behalf of writers, literary professionals, journalists, artists, cartoonists and musicians who are unjustly persecuted, harassed, imprisoned and even murdered in violation of their right to freedom of expression. The empty chair became the programme's enduring symbol for imprisoned writers, and in 2011 English PEN commissioned the sculptor Antony Gormley to create Witness, a cast-iron empty chair installed on the piazza of the British Library in London to mark the organisation's ninetieth anniversary; it was unveiled on 13 December 2011. A residency programme also gives persecuted or censored international writers a period of respite in the UK; former residents have included Zehra Doğan and Nurcan Baysal.
Libel Reform and UK Campaigning
English PEN's domestic campaigning has had a measurable effect on British law. In 2009 it joined forces with Index on Censorship for a year-long Libel Inquiry, prompted by the phenomenon of libel tourism that was chilling investigative journalism around the world and stifling scientific debate. The inquiry's final report, Free Speech Is Not For Sale, identified the central problems with the existing libel system and offered ideas for reform, leading to the launch of the Libel Reform Campaign alongside Sense about Science. The campaign pressed for a fairer libel law that would protect public-interest speech, and its arguments fed directly into the political momentum that produced the Defamation Act 2013. English PEN continues to monitor threats to free expression in the UK, including the use of strategic lawsuits against public participation and other pressures on journalists, academics and writers.
The PEN Pinter Prize
English PEN runs three annual awards that recognise courage and excellence in writing. The most prominent is the PEN Pinter Prize, established in 2009 in memory of the Nobel laureate playwright Harold Pinter. It is awarded each year to a writer from Britain, the Republic of Ireland or the Commonwealth who, in the words of Pinter's Nobel speech, casts an "unflinching, unswerving" gaze upon the world and shows a fierce intellectual determination to define the real truth of lives and societies. Uniquely, the prize is shared with an International Writer of Courage, chosen by the winner in association with English PEN's Writers at Risk programme — linking literary honour directly to the defence of persecuted writers. Winners have included Tony Harrison, Hanif Kureishi, David Hare, Carol Ann Duffy, Tom Stoppard, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Michael Rosen and Arundhati Roy.
The Hessell-Tiltman and Heaney Prizes
Alongside the Pinter Prize, English PEN administers the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, an annual award of £2,000 for a non-fiction book of specifically historical content, whose past winners include David Olusoga's Black and British, Tom Holland's Rubicon, Diarmaid MacCulloch's A History of Christianity and Anita Anand's The Patient Assassin. Until 2023 it also ran the PEN/Ackerley Prize for literary autobiography. In 2024 English PEN launched the PEN Heaney Prize in partnership with Irish PEN and the estate of Seamus Heaney: an annual £5,000 award for a volume of poetry of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships. The first winner was Susannah Dickey's ISDAL. Funded by and honouring former PEN members and significant literary figures, the prizes recognise historical non-fiction, literary autobiography and a courageous approach to the written word.
Literature in Translation
A distinctive strand of English PEN's work is its support for literature in translation. The organisation works to develop opportunities for publishers, translators and translated voices, aiming to encourage diversity in the literary landscape. It champions international literature through events and prizes, and its grants and awards programmes have long helped British publishers take on translated fiction and non-fiction that might otherwise struggle to find a home in the English-language market. This commitment flows directly from the PEN Charter's insistence that literature knows no frontiers: by bringing voices from other languages into English, English PEN argues, readers gain the mutual understanding the founders sought in 1921, and writers working in smaller or marginalised languages gain access to a global readership.
Membership and Governance
English PEN is a membership organisation whose community numbers more than 1,000 people, including novelists, journalists, non-fiction writers, editors, poets, essayists, playwrights, publishers, translators, agents, human rights activists and readers. Membership is open to all who subscribe to the aims set out in the PEN Charter. The organisation is governed by a board of trustees elected from and by its members. The current President is Margaret Busby, the pioneering publisher and editor, who succeeded the human rights lawyer Philippe Sands in April 2023; past presidents include John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, J. B. Priestley, Storm Jameson, Stephen Spender, Antonia Fraser, Ronald Harwood, Lisa Appignanesi, Gillian Slovo and Maureen Freely. The Chair is Ruth Borthwick, former chief executive and artistic director of the Arvon Foundation, who took up the role in December 2021, and the Director is Daniel Gorman. Trustees include figures from across literature and the media, among them Aki Schilz, Guy Gunaratne, Arifa Akbar and Can Yeğinsu.
English PEN Today
More than a century after its foundation, English PEN remains both a literary society and a human rights organisation, working nationally and internationally to defend free expression and support writers at risk. Its campaigns address contemporary threats — from the imprisonment of writers abroad to the chilling of public-interest journalism at home — while its events and prizes celebrate the diversity of literature and the courage of those who produce it under pressure. As the founding centre of a movement that now spans 145 centres in more than 100 countries, English PEN continues to argue, as it did in 1921, that the unhampered transmission of thought within each nation and between all nations is the precondition of a free and flourishing literature. Its official website is englishpen.org.
