The PEN International Stage & Screen Circle
PEN International has traditionally been a place where great artists of stage and screen -Thornton Wilder, Maurice Maeterlinck, Arthur Miller, Ronald Harwood, Octavio Paz and Harold Pinter- have fought for freedom of expression the world over. Today, as even a mobile phone can be a movie camera, we are able to bear witness to human rights violations as never before. In these times, more than ever, PEN defends playwrights, screenwriters and filmmakers who are censored, silenced and jailed.
I consider freedom of expression the most important cause that PEN supports. Without freedom of expression we are lost. Ronald Harwood, PEN International President Emeritus
Jennifer Clement, PEN International President
We are united by the power of the word, whether on the screen or on the page. Directors, novelists, screenwriters, playwrights, actors – we are all woven together in the cause for free expression that puts PEN on the frontline.
The work of PEN International is great, and I am so pleased to have contributed to their mission! nathan lane
John Ralston Saul, PEN International President Emeritus
I know from my own experience that you can be censored as easily on the screen as on the page. PEN International is there, around the world, to defend us however brutal or subtle the context.
My respect for this organisation has no borders‌PEN has been so fierce, so consistent and ferocious in its efforts that it is hard to ignore their worldwide impact.
DAVID CRONENBERG
Toni Morrison, PEN International Vice President.
Stage & Screen & PEN International
The PEN story
The PEN circles
The Stage & Screen Circle
PEN International and the Stage and Screen worlds have been intertwined for almost one hundred years and one of PEN’s founding members, along with H.G. Wells, was George Bernard Shaw.
PEN International was founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere, emphasize the role of literature in developing mutual understanding and world culture, fight for freedom of expression and act as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
The publishers circle
Although PEN’s members have always included great people from the Stage and Screen, the global threat to playwrights, directors and screenwriters is evident in many parts of the world. Recent cases include two Zimbabweans: the founder of the production company Eye for Africa, Prudence Uriri, now in exile in Norway, and the renowed playwright Christopher Mlalazi, exiled in Mexico; the Turkish Can Dündar, journalist and documentarian, now in exile in Germany; the Iranian visual artist and filmmaker Elahe Rahroniya, exiled in Norway. And the Russian filmaker Andrei Nekrasov, who received the PEN International/Oxfam Novib award in 2011 after suffering persecution and exile because of his movie Rebellion: the Litvinenko Case, including interviews with assassinated former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko and journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
Exceptional playwrights, screenwriters, actors and movie directors have been and are today members of PEN. In the 96 years since its inception, PEN’s active members have included Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, Aung San Suu Kyi, J.M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, David Cronenberg, Nadine Gordimer, Gunter Grass, Vaclav Havel, Eugène Ionesco, Mario Vargas Llosa, Norman Mailer, Amin Malouf, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Pablo Neruda, Sofi Oksanen, Harold Pinter, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Susan Sontag, Tom Stoppard, Rabindranath Tagore, Luisa Valenzuela, H.G. Wells, Thornton Wilder, Liu Xiaobo and many many more. PEN’s lore is filled with compelling stories. Arthur Miller, as President of PEN International, showed how literature could rise above politics and forged relationships with writers such as Pablo Neruda. However in 1969, it was his relationship to Marilyn Monroe that impressed Nigeria’s head of state and helped to free the poet and playwright, Wole Soyinka, who was sentenced to death. Soyinka received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Arthur Miller wrote that PEN attempts to apply “the universalist tradition of literature to the melting down of those geographical and psychological barriers of nationalism for whose perpetuation humanity has always spent its noblest courage, and it’s most ferocious savagery.”
In 1933 PEN led protests against the bonfires that the Nazi Party lit across Germany to burn thousands of books they’d decided were “impure”, and wrote to governments to appeal against religious and political imprisonments. A major German playwriter, Ernst Töller, attended the PEN International congress in Dubrovnik that year and called PEN to be one of the first antifascist organisations. The PEN Charter was developed in direct response to these events to establish and remind all our members of the fact we each have personal responsibility to resist race, class, and nationalistic hatreds, and PEN’s efforts to counter discriminatory narratives, injustice and the censorship of government critics was established in earnest. PEN is the world’s oldest and largest human rights organization and the oldest international literary organization. The association has autonomous PEN centres in more than 100 countries. PEN originally stood for “Poets, Essayists, Novelists,” but now stands for “Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, Novelists,” and includes writers of any form of literature, including journalists and historians.
Members • Albert
List of members of German PEN in exile in London
Bonniers Förlag • Cappelen Damm • C.H. Beck • Dar El Shorouk • De Geus • De Oberoende • Ediciones Salamandra • Finnish Book Publishers Association • Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore • Granta Publications • Gyldendal Norsk Förlag • Hachette Livre
Canada • HarperCollins International • Holtzbrinck Publishing Group • Natur & Kultur • Norstedts Förlagsgrupp • Penguin Group • Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial • Random House • Simon & Schuster • Suhrkamp Verlag • Yapı Kredi Culture Arts and Publishing
Elahe Rahroniya
The readers circle
Individuals from around the world who support freedom of speech and literature whether it be on the page, stage or screen.
Vaclav Havel was a PEN case and hosted the 1994 PEN congress in Prague
The Stage and Screen Circle is an opportunity for both individuals and companies from the film industries to support the essential work of PEN International in protecting freedom of expression and celebrating story-telling.
Andrei Nekrasov
The writers circle Members • Isabel Allende • Hanan Al-Shaykh
PEN defends freedom of expression and the power of Literature.
• Jirõ Asada • Margaret Atwood • Robert
Cottrell • Nina George • Arthur Golden • Hakan Günday • Karl Ove Knausgaard
PEN defends the written word, the spoken word and the filmed word.
John Galsworthy, Nobel prize and first international President of PEN, Founder Catherine Amy Dawson-Scott and International Secretary Herman Ould
• HarperCollins
Poster of Antoni Tàpies for the day of the imprisoned writer”
• David
Lagercrantz • Eric Lax • Joanne Leedom-Ackerman • Geert Mak • Yann Martel • Alexander McCall Smith • Vida Ognjenovic • Sofi Oksanen • Ian Rankin
• Judith
Rodriguez • Salman Rushdie • John Ralston Saul • Bernhard Schlink • Elif Shafak • Burhan Sönmez • Colm Tóibín • Yosef Wosk
Stana Katic
© Bruce Glikas
Producers of the New York hit play White Rabbit Red “ As Rabbit we’re honored to support PEN International, its mission, and the power of an individual voice to make a difference.
”
Devlin Elliott and Tom Kirdahy
Imagine a village above which is perched an enormous boulder. What holds that boulder in place is a number of surprisingly small pebbles that are in just the right spot. Nudge those pebbles away, and the boulder rolls down and flattens the village. The boulder in this image is the evil that preys upon the democracies of the world: authoritarianism, human rights violations, violations of indigenous rights, sexism, patriarchy, environmental degradation, and so on. And PEN is one of those pebbles without whose tireless, invaluable work, the boulder would move. Yann Martel
To become a member of the Stage & Screen Circle, please email Josie O’Reilly: Josie.oreilly@pen-international.org or Sign up via the PEN International website: www.pen-international.org/support-us/the-pen-stage-screen-circle