Recently marking 100 years since its launch in London, PEN has evolved into a global defender of author rights and freedom of expression. Here, Jennifer Clement, president emerita of PEN International, charts the major milestones that illustrate the ongoing importance of its mission.
On 5 October 1921, Catherine Amy Dawson Scott hosted a dinner in London. Her idea was a club where writers from every nation could meet as colleagues. PEN takes its name from the writers it was founded to bring together: poets, playwrights, editors, essayists and novelists. A century on, that club has grown into PEN International, with centres in more than 100 countries, each adhering to the PEN International Charter’s ideals that opens with the principle that “literature knows no frontiers”. The London centre that Catherine Amy Dawson Scott started continues as English PEN.
The organisation’s first case was the advocacy in 1935 for the renowned Haitian writer Jacques Roumain, who had been arrested on numerous occasions for participating in the resistance movement against the occupation of Haiti by the US. This case was followed by that of the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca who, in 1936, was executed by a nationalist firing squad. His assassination, and PEN’s inability to save him, became a defining moment that forever shaped the organisation’s commitment to defending writers at risk. When Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler was sentenced to death in Francisco Franco’s Spain in 1937, PEN tried again. A cable to General Franco with the names of PEN’s council members (as well as those of EM Foster and Aldous Huxley) helped secure his release.
Another early case was that of the Albanian writer Musine Kokalari, whose book As My Old Mother Tells Me is thought to be the first collection of writings by an Albanian woman to be published in Albania. She was one of the founding members of the Social Democratic Party and was considered an enemy of the people. In 1946 she was sentenced to 20 years in prison. When PEN became involved, she’d already been incarcerated for 15 years. PEN’s involvement may have aided in her early release to a labour camp, although she was never allowed to write again. In 1960, the work that began with Roumain was formalised as the Writers in Prison Committee.
The threats have changed shape since then, and PEN has continued to change with them: into the persecution of apostates, the abuse of defamation and anti-terrorism laws, the banning of books and laws that silence LGBTQ+ expression or curtail digital freedom. It campaigned for Salman Rushdie after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or religious decree, in 1989 calling for his death over The Satanic Verses. It spoke out after the 2015 attack on the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and after the 2018 killing of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Defending the rights of writers has meant PEN has learned how to defend the languages they write in. In 1978, PEN founded its International Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee to protect minority languages, resist forced assimilation and champion translators and translations. The committee went on to help develop the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, adopted in 1996. Meanwhile, in the last year alone, English PEN has awarded 32 PEN Translates grants to support literature in translation, spanning 25 languages.
Catherine Amy Dawson Scott founded PEN but never led it. When some centres refused to admit women, she put forward the 1928 resolution that allowed them to become members. It would be another 87 years before a woman was elected president.
I was elected president of PEN International in 2015 and set out to put women writers at the centre of PEN’s work. The PEN International Women’s Manifesto treats the silencing of women’s knowledge and creativity as a loss for all of humanity and censorship as a form of violence. It also names a pattern that recurs across the world: that “culture, religion and tradition are repeatedly valued above human rights” and used to defend harm against women and girls.
The Democracy of the Imagination Manifesto, adopted in Manila in 2019, returned to the PEN Charter’s first principle. If “literature knows no frontiers” neither does imagination. Writers may invoke the manifesto when they are challenged for writing beyond their own identities or lived experiences, because policing the imagination breeds self-censorship, which it calls “one of the most treacherous forms of censorship”.
The work of Catherine Amy Dawson Scott began over dinner is as necessary now as it was in 1921. In 2025 alone, PEN International documented 140 cases of persecution against writers worldwide, including 32 writers in prison. A few years ago, we received a letter from the Kurdish journalist and poet Nedim Türfent, who spent more than six years in a maximum security prison in Turkey before his release in 2022. Of the solidarity that reached him there, he wrote, “Knowing that you are right there, akin to keeping company to caged birds, is beyond any dream inside this cell.” Catherine Amy Dawson Scott founded a club so that writers could keep one another company. A century later, that company extends into prison cells.
Jennifer Clement is the president emerita of PEN International and author of Widow Basquiat, which was Dua’s monthly read in June 2025.
At this year’s London Literature Festival, discover the powerful work of English PEN at Service95 and English PEN: Censorship Live! with a session on free expression, censorship and global literary activism. Buy tickets here.
