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branches), she was a key figure in a popular campaign in Camden which succeeded in getting their particular local cuts rescinded.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.

PEN International held a conference in Venice. Delegates included W. H. Auden , C. P. Snow , Pamela Hansford Johnson , and Cecily Mackworth .

At the International PEN Congress in Vienna, a majority of the delegates voted for the establishment of a Women Writers Committee .

The P.E.N. Club (later PEN International ), a world association of authors, was founded in London by writers C. A. Dawson Scott and Violet Hunt .

The Young PEN Club , designed for beginning writers, held its inaugural meeting, chaired by John Galsworthy ; also present were E. M. Forster and the young Frances Parker (soon to be Bellerby) .