Role of PEN
PEN is a non-governmental organization in formal consultative relations with UNESCO and Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.
The first PEN Club was founded in London in 1921 by Catherine Amy Dawson Scott, with John Galsworthy as its first President. Its first members included Joseph Conrad, Elizabeth Craig, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells.
The club established the following aims:
- To promote intellectual co-operation and understanding among writers;
- To create a world community of writers that would emphasize the central role of literature in the development of world culture; and,
- To defend literature against the many threats to its survival which the modern world poses.
Past Presidents of International PEN have included Malcolm Afford, Alberto Moravia, Heinrich Böll, Arthur Miller, Mario Vargas Llosa, Homero Aridjis and Jiří Gruša. The current President is John Ralston Saul.
International PEN is headquartered in London and composed of 145 autonomous PEN Centres in 104 countries around the world, each of which are open to qualified writers, journalists, translators, historians and others actively engaged in any branch of literature, regardless of nationality, race, colour or religion.
Read more about this topic: International PEN
Famous quotes containing the words role of, role and/or pen:
“Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
“The trouble is that the expression ‘material thing’ is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for ‘sense-datum’; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he ‘perceives.’”
—J.L. (John Langshaw)
“Its whether will ye be a rank robber’s wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen knife?
Its I’ll not be a rank robber’s wife,
But I’ll rather die by your wee pen knife.
He ‘s killed this may and he ‘s laid her by,
For to bear the red rose company.”
—Unknown. Babylon; or, The Bonnie Banks o’ Fordie (l. 9–14)