EB was involved in a PEN conference which discussed the issue of help for writers in Axis countries (including contries recently occupied).

Early in the second world war she worked at an indeterminate job with the Ministry of Information , commissioning articles on the British war effort and placing them in US periodicals: the placing had to come first, so that pieces could be tailored to the specifications of the outlet. After leaving Hungary she lectured to women's groups in Tokyo (about European countries she had known, as a courtesy to her diplomatic hosts), and in the United States (about the British war effort, for my bread and butter, since her husband was now practically on the dole). (The Foreign Office did not at this date pay its personnel between postings.) She also lectured in Montreal (for the PEN Club ) and in Quebec city. After Pearl Harbor she found the tact with which she addressed the topic Should America enter the war? had suddenly become academic. But she also discovered that the reputation of US lecture tours for earning money was largely myth; she just about broke even.

JC belonged to the English Centre of International PEN , the worldwide association of writers.

FPC was a friend of Emily Faithfull , Geraldine Jewsbury , and Rosa Bonheur , and she knew Josephine Butler , Augusta Webster , Lady Battersea , Emily Pfeiffer , Anne Thackeray Ritchie , Helen Taylor , Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon , Lady Byron , and Matilda Betham-Edwards . Her involvement with Mentia Taylor 's Pen and Pencil Club from 1864 brought her into contact with yet more writers. She numbered Maria Grey , Emily Shirreff , Millicent Garrett Fawcett , Julia Wedgwood , and Florence Davenport Hill among her most beloved, and honoured friends. She never met Harriet Martineau but she claimed that with the two great exceptions of Martineau and George Eliot she could boast of having come into contact with nearly all the more gifted English women of the Victorian era. Presumably a relationship with Martineau was out of the question because of her friendship with Harriet's estranged brother James .

She is a member of PEN International , and has consistently spoken out against political oppression and punishment of writers opposing their national governments.

CAD was awarded an OBE in 1995. In 1999 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She was created a CBE in the New Year's Honours List at the end of the year 2001 and acted as one of the judges on the Cardiff International Poetry Competition for 2003. She won the PEN Pinter Prize in 2012.CAD 's work is much taught in schools, despite the fracas over knife-fighting (above). She has been warmly praised by female fellow-poets. (Deryn Rees-Jones , author of the first book-length study of CAD , is one of these.)

BE became a member of PEN , the organization devoted to supporting writers who are persecuted for political or ideological reasons.

In 1939, EF became a member of the executive committee of the PEN Club . She remained on the committee for ten years, during which its chief work was helping with the escape and establishment of refugees. Her fellow-members included C. V. Wedgwood and Rebecca West . She also gave readings for children with Walter de la Mare (an old friend); one of the texts she read from was Fanny Kemble 's journal. In 1959, her house became a centre for the campaign to launch the Hampstead Theatre .

As an established author, albeit well past most people's retirement age, PF lectured and read her work at festivals and other venues, served on the Arts Council 's literature panel, and was a member of the council of PEN .

In 1951 she took a job with the Red Cross , working as a travelling librarian visiting and servicing hospital libraries. She then moved into journalism, becoming a sub-editor on Weldon Ladies Journal in 1952, and assistant editor of Time and Tide from 1952 to 1954. During her Time and Tide years Veronica Wedgwood , under whom she worked, taught her to prune, to summarise, to edit. She stopped working when her first child was born, and began her serious career as a writer as soon as the youngest went to school. She is a member of PEN . In 2006 she served as short-story judge for the valuable Bridport Prize. (The poetry judge that year was Lavinia Greenlaw .)

With the support of Violet Hunt and May Sinclair , RH was elected a member of the writers' organisation PEN .

During the summer and autumn of 1921, VH helped her friend and colleague C. A. Sappho Dawson Scott with the establishment of the P.E.N. Club (later PEN International ), originally a writers' association designed to facilitate creative discussions in a convivial atmosphere. Hunt offered to host French author Romain Rolland during the first PEN International Congress in 1923. John Galsworthy , however, wrote to Dawson Scott: does it occur to you that he may feel it odd to be the guest of a bachelor woman? We don't want to risk his not coming for any such reason. (Rolland was eventually accompanied by his sister.) Hunt sat on the P.E.N. Club's Committee until 1928, when she was replaced by someone younger.

In September 1949, before her second marriage, PHJ was in Venice for a conference of PEN International . Cecily Mackworth mentions her nervousness when at an official banquet she was seated next to the head of the Italian delegation, who stubbornly resisted all attempts to engage him in conversation.

ML belonged to the Women's Press Club of London and to PEN .

The following year she won the David Cohen British Literature Prize, which The Author called the best and most worthy of all literary prizes, and the year after that the Golden PEN Award for a lifetime's distinguished service to literature. Hermione Lee , presenting this award, called DLa writer who sinks her teeth into the history of our times.

Living in Oxford, PL became an aficionado of local churches, visiting them and studying their features with the help of the guidebooks of Nikolaus Pevsner . She also became a member of PEN International and of the Society of Authors .

At about the same time, when the public library service was suffering cuts (especially to smaller branches), she was a key figure in a popular campaign in Camden which succeeded in getting their particular local cuts rescinded. This in turn led to her undertaking speaking engagements around the country on behalf of libraries. She is quoted as saying, I enjoy going out and talking. . . . Libraries are wonderful places and absolutely not expendable. She has also worked for the Executive Committee of PEN .

Willa and Edwin Muir represented the Scottish division of PEN at the International Congress of PEN in Budapest.

Over the course of her career AM 's stories have appeared in the periodicals already mentioned, in Atlantic, Grand Street, the Montrealer, and from 1977 the New Yorker (with which since 1978 she has had a first-refusal contract renewed each year). They have also been frequently and increasingly anthologized, twice in collections published by PEN Canada .

KN served as president of the Progressive League . In 1974 she became president for a year of the English branch of PEN International , whose quarterly magazine (titled from its parent organization, in varying forms, P. E. N. International Bulletin of Selected Books) she edited from 1960 to 1989.

As a writer she was an assiduous attender of literary festivals, a virtuoso reader of her own and other authors' work. She tells a story from her whoring or book-promotion days of sitting beside Edna O'Brien at a signing (where O'Brien's books were going like hot cakes and hers were not) and successfully offloading a copy of her own work after concealing it inside an O'Brien dust-jacket. She sat on juries for literary prizes: the Whitbread, the Orange, the John Llewellyn Rhys, the Commonwealth, the Booker, as well as teaching on Arvon creative writing courses and lecturing abroad for the British Council . She served as a Vice-President of PEN International .

LMS was the first president of the Scottish PEN . Her obituary in the Times concluded: Many a Scottish and English poet . . . owes much to her encouragement shyly but sincerely given.

Her first letter to Dear Mrs. Woolf, written on 26 March 1923, was an invitation to join the PEN club . Sackville-West did not yet know Woolf at all well, since she supposed Woolf might find the club's monthly dinners quite amusing; but she included a gender-bending joke, saying that at the prospect of Woolf for a member John Galsworthy had (so to speak) got up and made a curtsey. Within two years she was writing to Virginia dear and lovely, and saying things like Please, in all this muddle of life, continue to be a bright and constant star. Just a few things remain as beacons: poetry, and you, and solitude. But like most correspondences this one thrived on the muddle of life. The way that these two minds struck sparks continues to be evident after the sexual affair was over. This is Sissinghurst 250—is that Museum 2621?—Is that Virginia? This is Vita speaking,—yes, Vita,—a person you once reckoned as a friend—Oh, had you forgotten? Well, dig about in your memory . . . .VSW continues to insist that whereas she likes Leonard Woolf , she loves Virginia. The late letters she wrote her, including the very last, on 6 March 1941, generate the warmest feeling out of wartime shortages of hay, milk, butter, and petrol.

Both kept up their political activity during the 1930s with active membership of such organizations as the National Council for Civil Liberties (whose first executive committee Sharp sat on) and of PEN International . Even after Nevinson's death, in her seventies, she did voluntary work for various bodies including the Friends .