#100PENMembers: We’ve reached 50!

This means we have featured 50 writers from PEN’s 100 year history!

We have roamed around the world, highlighting the activities of writers from China to Nigeria to Argentina to India to Japan to the US to Zimbabwe to the UK to Hungary and more. We have travelled across history, looking at PEN’s founding members, including Catharine Dawson Scott, John Galsworthy, Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells and Sophia Wadia, and its contemporary voices, such as Jennifer Clement, Kamila Shamsie, Isabel Allende, and Elif Shafak. We have detailed the contributions of some of PEN’s most controversial members, including F. T. Marinetti, as well as those caught up in the politics of the cultural cold war, such as Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Miller, Boris Pasternak, and Václav Havel.

We have honed in on global writers crucial to the promotion of political and civil rights, including Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Wole Soyinka, and Chinua Achebe, as well as writers at the forefront of more recent global free speech disputes around blasphemy and government sedition, such as Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Liu Xiabo, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Ma Thida.

Our PEN100 site opens up a view of global literary networks, collaborations and disagreements. Tomorrow we launch ourselves into the next 50 PEN members!