CADS
was first a poet; then after a long break in her publishing career she produced almost twenty novels, including works that make her a significant regional novelist of the Cornish coast. She also wrote plays, a travel book, short stories, and books about the occult and her psychic experiences. Both her poetry and fiction express her feminist conviction of the necessity of women's sexual, personal, and financial freedom. Her work was progressive for its era, tackling taboo subjects such as domestic violence, adultery, and premarital sex. She achieved critical commendation, but never a particularly wide readership, and is chiefly remembered today for having founded the literary organization PEN
.
Jameson described the 1933 Labour Conference at Hastings as haunted by the ghost of German Social Democracy, in the shape usually of a young doctor or lawyer, with a pale intelligent face, and no money. What did these revenants hope from their assembled English comrades?321 Jameson began to associate with refugees in London from about this year forward. Though she later undertook more formal, concerted refugee work with PEN, she now hosted some of the first exiles from Hitler's Germany.321-5
Later, in 1982-3, MA
was President of the Writers' Union of Canada
. She was President of the Canadian branch of PEN International
in 1984-6. She became a Vice-President of Pen International on 11 July 2007, joining other such distinguished writers as Nadine Gordimer
and Toni Morrison
.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Smith, Caitlin. International PEN elects former PEN Canada Presidents Margaret Atwood and Haroon Siddiqui. 11 July 2007.
According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, reviewers liked this book, praising its vivid and forceful use of language. PB
, however, later remembered that it brought the killer bees out in force, led . . . by Roy Fuller
.
Sherry, Vincent B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 40. Gale Research, 1985.
24
and had effects useful to her career. A few years later she was asked to co-edit, with Ted Hughes
and Vernon Scannell
, the 1962 PEN
anthology, and it probably helped her get her lecturing position at Goldsmiths's College
.
Sherry, Vincent B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 40. Gale Research, 1985.
JG
was a novelist and dramatist who began publishing just before the end of the nineteenth century. The series of novels for which he is now best known, The Forsyte Saga, is historical, since its story begins forty years before the first in the series appeared. In 1921 JG
became first president of the PEN Club
(later PEN International
) founded by Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
and Violet Hunt
, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922.
She visited London in April 2009, and went on to New York the following month in connection with a conference of PEN International
. She was in London again in April 2010 and in late 2015; in 2012 she was in Dubai.
“Library welcomes Nawal El Saadawi”. Women’s Library Newsletter, 1 Mar. 2009– 2024.
AF
's public work continued after her second marriage. She chaired the Crime Writers' Association
, and became in 1984 a founding trustee of the Authors' Foundation
. When she retired as a trustee she set up a six-monthly Authors' Foundation grant of £3,000 to go to a writer working in women's biography. She was successively vice president and president of the English branch of PEN
at the particularly difficult historical moment when the fatwah was declared against novelist Salman Rushdie
.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
276
Wroe, Nicholas. “The history woman”. The Guardian, 24 Aug. 2002, pp. 16-19.
19
PEN International
, she observed in June 1989, survives despite being inherently liable to a split between those dissident writers who are more and those who are less willing to communicate with the non-dissidents whom they regard as collaborators.
Fraser, Antonia. Must You Go?. Random House of Canada, 2010.
Spark's interest in Mary Shelley had first been aroused by reading Ariel, André Maurois' life of Percy Shelley
. She said later that writing this book against time for economic reasons and at the same time trying to be scrupulously accurate was not easy.
Having done most of the writing by night, she borrowed a typewriter for the final draft, which because of the noise she could not use while others slept. The book was published by Pen-in-Hand
(later Tower Bridge Publications
), which was no good at marketing and had to remainder 700 copies at the end of two years.
Stannard, Martin. Muriel Spark. The Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009.
120
The book included as an appendix an abridged text of Shelley's The Last Man, then otherwise unavailable. It was slightly revised and published as Mary Shelley in 1988, minus its introduction and its original flowery chapter headings.
GS
served for three years as president of English PEN
. One month before her term was due to expire she resigned her presidency in order to draw attention to what she said was an issue of democratic accountability in the governance of this revered institution. In Slovo's words, a decision was taken by a majority on the board, and a minority worked in a way that stopped it being carried out.
Bury, Liz. “Gillian Slovo wins Golden PEN award”. theguardian.com, 3 Dec. 2013.
HP
and Arthur Miller
, visiting Turkey for PEN International
to protest against mistreatment of intellectuals, were proscribed by the military regime for giving a press conference.
Fraser, Antonia. Must You Go?. Random House of Canada, 2010.
JK
joined the women's movement as soon as she read about it, and was active in London during the 1970s as a member of the first Women's Liberation Workshop
, the Labour Party
, and the Women's Literature Collective
. As a member of PEN International
she edited its broadsheet, The Pen, during the 1980s. She broke, painfully, with the Labour Party in 1999.
Kazantzis, Judith. “The Errant Unicorn”. On Gender and Writing, edited by Michelene Wandor, Pandora Press, 1983, pp. 24-30.
26
Kazantzis, Judith et al. Touch Papers. Allison and Busby, 1982.
After travelling the Middle East, CM
spent an unsettled, in-between year divided between London and Paris, with frequent crossings between Newhaven and Dieppe.
Mackworth, Cecily. Ends of the World. Carcanet, 1987.
109
In June 1949 she attended a Decade or conference on The Preservation of Literature at the Abbaye de Royaumont, near Chantilly in France, and though she did not appreciate all of the literary argument, she thought that the ambience of the place was bliss. Another conference she attended was that of PEN International
in Venice in September 1949, for which she earned the money by some casual jobs in film.
Mackworth, Cecily. Ends of the World. Carcanet, 1987.
113, 114, 122
She saw the conference as belonging to a vanished era of respect and status for the author, but she took full advantage of the place: when the speeches start, I slip away and wander in this extraordinary floating city.
Mackworth, Cecily. Ends of the World. Carcanet, 1987.
Meanwhile she prepared to receive evacuees from London, and volunteered for first aid work, nursing, and night shifts with the ARP (Air Raid Precaution)
.
After the war she became a member both of the PEN Club
and of the Jane AustenSociety
, and she served during 1946-7 as President of the Pedestrians' Association
, an organisation devoted to controlling cars and drivers. She took up lecturing (proving to be a good public speaker) and appeared on the BBC
's Brains Trust programme—always recorded, not live.
EB
resigned from PEN
, because after reflection, she no longer [felt] in sympathy with their aims—presumably an allusion to PEN's strong anti-Fascist position.
Sebba, Anne. Enid Bagnold: The Authorized Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.
Bawden, Nina. In My Own Time: Almost An Autobiography. Virago, 1995.
166
Marina Warner
remembered years afterwards that as a Booker judge NB
(with the actress Joanna Lumley
) had strongly opposed the award of the prize to Keri Hulme
's The Bone Peopleon the grounds of its violence. Bawden later publicly dissociated herself from the judges' majority decision.
“Tears, tiffs and triumphs”. Guardian Unlimited, 6 Sept. 2008.
She attended seriously to becoming a writer, and with this in view attended the inaugural meeting of the Young PEN Club
on 4 October 1928, where she was introduced to John Galsworthy
.
Gittings, Robert, and Frances Bellerby. “Introduction”. Selected Poems, edited by Anne Stevenson and Anne Stevenson, Enitharmon Press, 1986.