Scottish PEN is a membership organisation governed by a Board of Trustees. Find out more about our Trustees, staff team and committees.
Our writer and reader members shape our work, run events and contribute to our campaigns. Find out more about membership and join us here.
Caroline Whitham is Scottish PEN’s Finance & Administration Worker, fielding membership enquiries as well as maintaining the charity’s office administration and bookkeeping. She studied publishing at Robert Gordon University before working as a production editor in Edinburgh for many years, eventually moving into administration. In addition to her role at PEN, she is the Deputy Editor of Foodies magazine.
You can contact the Scottish PEN staff team at info@scottishpen.org
Scottish PEN is governed by a Board which meets roughly every six weeks. The Board leads strategic decision making of the charity and oversees the work of staff. It is currently composed of:
Ricky Monahan Brown is the author of the memoir Stroke: A 5% chance of survival from Sandstone Press, which was one of The Scotsman’s Scottish Books of 2019. He is the co-founder and curator of the multiple award-winning irregular night of live spoken word and musical entertainment, Interrobang?! which has served as a vehicle to facilitate one of the strands of Scottish PEN’s Many Voices project and has supported Scottish PEN’s work in opposing pervasive surveillance.
Fiona Graham is an editor, researcher and writer having worked for publishers such as Calder and Boyars, Quartet and Canongate and then researched and written projects for organisations such as Nova Scotia Marketing Agency, the Edinburgh International Festival, the National Library of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh.
Drew Campbell is a novelist, playwright and poet whose work has appeared in many publications and various media. An SAC Writing Fellow from 2002 – 2005, he was Writer-in-Residence for schools in Argyll & Bute 2007 – 2011, and held a Scottish Book Trust reading residency in 2013 – 14. He was the Scottish PEN President between 2010 – 16.
Colin Donati is a Scottish-born poet and musician of thirdgeneration Italian descent. He gives regular public readings of his work, including extracts from his Scots translation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and performs his songs and song-settings as part of the duo Various Moons with cellist, Robin Mason. In 2014, he edited the collected dramatic works of Robert McLellan, Playing Scotland’s Story (Luath Press). He lives in Edinburgh.
Lizzie is a writer, actor, teacher and activist. After 15 years as a university lecturer in theatre, she moved to Malta in 2008. Her novel, Vandalism (2015), was shortlisted for a National Book Prize in Malta and it was here she became involved in the fight to get justice for Daphne Caruana Galizia. She continued campaigning when she moved back to Glasgow in 2019 and is an active member of Occupy Justice (a women-led pressure group) and Repubblika (an anti-corruption NGO). Lizzie’s other novel, Duende (2014), focuses on political issues in Spain before the civil war and she publishes regularly in PENning as well as producing journalistic work.
Bashabi Fraser is an award winning poet, writer and academic. Her awards include the 2015 was ‘Outstanding Woman of Scotland’ conferred by the Saltire Society and the Word Masala Foundation Award for Excellence in Poetry in 2017.. She has authored and edited 22 books and been widely anthologised. Her recent publications include Rabindranath Tagore, a biography (2019), The Homing Bird (2017), Scottish Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: the Continuum of Ideas (2017), Thali Katori: An Anthology of Scottish & South Asian Poetry (2017), Confluence of Minds: The Rabindranath Tagore and Patrick Geddes Reader on Education and the Environment (2017). She is Professor Emerita and Director of the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies at Edinburgh Napier University, an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Edinburgh and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Dundee. She is the Chief Editor of the international academic and creative e-journal, Gitanjali and Beyond.
Mario Relich’s book of poems Frisky Ducks was published by Grace Note in 2014. His poems have appeared in Poetry journals, and in the ‘Poem of the Day’ section of The Herald. He is also a retired academic who was a lecturer on Post-Colonial Literature and Film History at the Open University, both in Scotland and London, for many years. At present, he writes regularly literary reviews, and an annual Edinburgh International Festival Diary for Scottish Affairs