Scottish PEN is a centre of PEN International and not-for-profit organisation that champions freedom of expression and literature across borders.
We are a membership organisation and work with a range of writers, campaigners, activists and communities across Scotland and around the world.
Find out more about us.
All members of Scottish PEN subscribe to the PEN Charter.
A number of our members and other Scottish poets have written poems in response to the current conflict, and have kindly given permission for them to be shared here. Scottish PEN invites further poetic and literary responses to the poems.
Join Scottish writers reading international writers struggling against oppression and sharing their own work at this free International Women’s Day event, 7th March 2025
On Saturday, 25 January, The Times published an article by senior news reporter Marc Horne, regarding the release of security service files that have recently been opened and placed in the UK National Archives at Kew. These documents disclosed that MI5 and the police monitored James Findlay (JF) Hendry, the poet, editor and writer for decades over […]
Every year on 27 January the UK marks the horrific organised slaughter perpetrated in Europe in the 1930s and 40s and in many other parts of the world since then. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp in Oswiecim, Poland. At a time when […]
Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s vital writing in his collected works, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is like an explainer of why the principles of the PEN International Charter are so vital. Scottish PEN is proud to join PEN International, fellow PEN Chapters, Reporters Without Borders and other human rights organisations in urging the Foreign Secretary […]
1824 – Charged with a mission by the Empress of Brazil, celebrated writer and the toast of Georgian London, Maria Graham sets off for England with the Brazilian civil war at its height. Newly widowed and a woman travelling alone, the stakes are high and when she accepts roguish smuggler Captain James Henderson’s offer of passage on his ship, she gets more than she bargains for.
PENning, the Writers in Exile Committee’s biannual online journal, presents work by Scottish PEN’s member-writers alongside writing from people living in Scotland who are from other parts of the world.
