In April 2007, the Melbourne branch of PEN International received a thank-you card from Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. He had been dead for months. By Arnold Zable
On the night of May 8, 2021, Myanmar poet and pro-democracy activist Khet Thi and his wife, Chaw Su, were taken from their home in the city of Shwebo by armed soldiers and police and detained at a local police station. Khet Thi was separated from his wife and taken to a military facility where he was tortured to death. The next day his wife was contacted to collect his body from hospital.
At first, the association was known simply as PEN, standing for “Poets, Essayists and Novelists”. Within four years, there were 25 PEN clubs in Europe, and by the mid-1930s, there were centres in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Beijing, Baghdad, Bombay, Cairo and Tokyo, among others. Wells was far more politically inclined than the mild-mannered Galsworthy. He presided over the group’s stormy international congress in Dubrovnik where German PEN’s membership was withdrawn. In its stead, a German PEN club in exile was set up in London.In 1960, a Writers in Prison Committee was founded to combat attempts to silence critical voices around the world. The PEN offices in London monitor about 1000 attacks on writers, journalists, editors and publishers in any given year.
Over time individual centres have developed their own identities. PEN Melbourne, for instance, has forged relationships with local writers from diverse backgrounds whose works, often for reasons of language, have been overlooked by the mainstream. It has developed connections with writers in the Asian and Pacific regions, and run writers’ workshops in Phnom Penh, Battambang and Siem Reap in partnership with PEN Cambodia.
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