P.E.N. Club

an international association of writers, founded in 1921. The P.E.N. Club is headed by a president who is elected every two years and by a permanent general secretary of an executive board, which is located in London. Congresses are held in countries with national P.E.N. centers.

Before World War II, the P.E.N. Club program had an antifascist character; after the war, the club’s conservative circles often took anti-Soviet and anti-Communist positions. Beginning in 1964, the P.E.N. Club leadership and the Writers’ Union of the USSR discussed the question of the participation of Soviet writers in the club’s activities. Delegations of Soviet writers have been observers at several congresses and meetings of the P.E.N. Club.

REFERENCE

International P.E.N.: Bulletin of Selected Books. London, 1950—.

Mentioned in ?

Arthur Miller

References in periodicals archive ?

Elle est membre de P.E.N. Club International (poetes, essayistes, nouvellistes) et de son Women Writers Committee, de l'Association vaudoise des ecrivains et de la Societe des ecrivains des Nations Unies a Geneve.

Maria Zaki, poetesse de l'aimance

Japan's P.E.N. Club, led by novelist Hisashi Inoue, voiced opposition Monday to a proposed bill to recognize the act of conspiracy as a crime even if no actual crime has been committed, saying the bill would violate freedom of thought, religion and assembly.

P.E.N. club expresses opposition to conspiracy bill

Talk-show punditry; book-launches every evening of the week; P.E.N. Club crusades against Verwoerd or Franco or Pinochet: suchlike enemies of authorial promise now abound from Salzburg to Sao Paulo, but in Hughes' youth they were distinctively Manhattanite.

Hughes. (Book Reviews)

The Japan P.E.N. Club said Friday it has decided to accept Tohti Tunyaz, a Chinese student at a graduate school of the University of Tokyo who is now serving an 11-year prison term in China, as an honorary member.

P.E.N. Club accepts Chinese student Tohti as honorary member

If the diary of the previous three years (reviewed in MLR, 91 (1996), 796-98) principally evokes the intense cultural life of postwar Vienna, a distinctive feature of the new volume is that Schnitzler was constantly on the move, partly visiting Heini in Berlin, partly exploiting his position as honorary president, albeit 'sehr contre coeur' (8 December 1923), of the Austrian P.E.N. Club. There are lecture tours to Denmark and Sweden, visits to south Germany (visiting Olga in Baden-Baden) and to Switzerland, and a Mediterranean cruise to Portugal.

Arthur Schnitzler: Tagebuch, 1923-1926

Organizations targeted by the government agency affiliated with the Justice Ministry even included volunteer groups set up by novelists and journalists such as the Japan P.E.N. Club and the Japan Congress of Journalists, according to the document.

Gov't agency views citizens groups as subversive

2 at the invitation of Amnesty and the Japan P.E.N. Club to hold lectures and press meetings and to visit the Diet and meet with government officials.