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.
Lisa is Scottish PEN’s Project Manager. She leads on campaigns, projects and communications, including our events and the day-to-day management of operations. She also supports Scottish PEN’s committees and Board of Trustees. Prior to joining Scottish PEN, Lisa worked with several other Scottish charities, including Children in Scotland, Scottish Commission for Learning Disability, Zero Tolerance and LGBT Youth Scotland. She is passionate about literature and the defense of human rights.
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.
Jenni Calder was for 23 years with the National Museum of Scotland, as education officer, Head of Publications, script editor for the Museum of Scotland (opened 1998) and Head of Museum of Scotland International. She has published widely on literary and historical subjects and writes fiction and poetry as Jenni Daiches. She has been an active member of Scottish PEN for over 30 years and president from 2007-11. Her latest book is The Burning Glass: The Life of Naomi Mitchison.
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.
Carl MacDougall has written three prize-winning novels, four pamphlets, four collections of short stories, including two for children, five works of non-fiction and edited four anthologies, including the best selling The Devil and the Giro. He has written and presented major television series for BBC 2 and BBC 4 and held a number of residencies and fellowships.
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
David Manderson is a novelist, short story and non-fiction writer. Lost Bodies, a psychological thriller, was published in 2011, Scottish Miserablism, a co-authored polemic, in 2104, while The Anti-hero’s Journey: the Work and Life of Alan Sharp, the first full examination of Sharp’s work, will appear in 2023. He has been chair of the Scottish PEN Writers for Peace committee and has published stories, articles and essays in many journals and magazines. He also launched Nerve magazine and the Real to Reel Short Film festival. In 2017, he was the Scottish Book Trust Robert Louis Stevenson Fellow at Grez-sur-Loing in France. He is committed to high quality writing and the right to considerate freedom of expression for all.
Ruth Aylett is a technologist, political activist and feminist, a poet and a novelist. A Professor of Computer Science, she has researched robotics and AI and is keenly concerned with ethical issues around this technology. Technology is one of the themes of her widely published poetry and feminism is another; she jointly authored a pamphlet Handfast in 2016 and her pamphlets Pretty in Pink and Queen of Infinite Space were published in 2021. Her novel Equinox, jointly authored with Greg Michaelson, will be published in 2023. She is also the author of two popular science books on robotics, most recently joint-authoring ‘Living with Robots: what every anxious human needs to know’ published by MIT press in 2021.