Board of Trustees

Maureen Freely, President135943-110827-maureen-freely

Maureen Freely is an author, journalist, translator and academic, who has written seven novels, as well as non-fiction. She is professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and the director of its writing programme. Her novel Sailing through Byzantium was named as one of the best novels of 2014 in both the TLS and the Sunday Times, and she has translated five books by the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. She is also  a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and  chair of the Translators Association.

Maureen has worked closely with English PEN over the past 15 years, with a particular focus on freedom of expression in Turkey: she has taken part in fact-finding missions and attended many trials, as well as speaking out for writers at risk. Most recently, she took part in an English PEN panel discussion at the Arcola Theatre in London last month, discussing the impact of the Gezi protests on free speech.

Daniel Hahn

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator, with some thirty books to his name. He is the author of a number of works of non-fiction, the translator of novels by writers including José Eduardo Agualusa, José Luís Peixoto and María Dueñas and non-fiction by Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago and Brazilian footballer Pelé, and editor of a number of reference books. He has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (with his translation of Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons) and a Blue Peter Book Award (for The Ultimate Book Guide, the first in his series of reading guides for children and teenagers), and judged a number of prizes including the IFFP and the Booktrust Teenage Prize.

He is currently chair of the Translators Association and interim director of the British Centre for Literary Translation, on the boards of Arcadia Books and Pop Up Projects, on the councils of Shakespeare’s Globe and Human Rights Watch, and on a number of other boards and committees. He is 37 and lives in Brighton.

Amanda Hopkinson

Amanda Hopkinson  (2)

Amanda Hopkinson has been active in Human Rights and literature throughout her life. She joined Amnesty International whilst still at school, on the recommendation of Norman Lewis. On graduating from university she went to work for AI in Latin America. Much of her writing has been concerned with and for, and influenced by publications on, human rights and freedom of expression. The first full-length translation she worked on was Ernesto Sabato’s Never Again published by Faber in 1986. She also contributed, through writing, translating and editing, regularly to Index on Censorship magazine.She has continued to have translations published, her latest being of Ricardo Piglia’s Money to Burn (Granta, 2003).

As an academic, she has been involved in establishing both Swansea and Norwich as ‘cities of refuge’, offering a haven to refugee writers. She has long supported the goals of PEN, a founding and enthusiastic member of the new PEN ‘Writers in Translation’ committees, in the US and UK, and she recently served as the Chair of the English one.

Nicolas Kent

nkent200Nicolas started his career at Liverpool Playhouse in 1967 as an ABC TV trainee regional theatre director. In 1970 he became Artistic Director of the Watermill Theatre, from 1970-72 Associate Director of the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh and from 1976-81 Administrative Director of The Oxford Playhouse Company. From 1984-2012 he was Artistic Director of the Tricycle Theatre in London.

He has directed productions in over 100 theatres around the world including the West End and New York; as well as for notable companies in the United Kingdom including The Royal Shakespeare Company, The Royal Court, The Donmar Warehouse, The Hampstead Theatre, the Lyric Hammersmith, The Young Vic and at the National Theatre.

He has also directed many plays in the USA both regionally and in New York, on television for the BBC both on Television and Radio. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters at Westminster University in 2008, and was made the first Freeman of the Borough of Brent in 2012.

Barry Kernon, Honorary Treasurer

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Barry is a Chartered Accountant who has been in private practice since 1972. For some 16 years he headed his own firm, Kernon & Co, until he joined H W Fisher & Company as a consultant when the two firms merged in 2002. Barry acts for a great many authors, journalists and others in the media world, and is an acknowledged expert in the tax treatment of individuals in the creative industries. He also advises many smaller business operating in a wide variety of sectors.

David Miller

David joined the Rogers, Coleridge & White literary agency in 1990, first working as the receptionist and becoming a director in 1997. He served as Treasurer of the Association of Author’s Agents and, in 2008, was awarded the Orion Publishing Group Literary Agent of the Year Awards.

He has been an advisor to the Literature Department of the British Council as well as the Creative Writing course at Edinburgh Napier University and is the author of a short novel, TODAY (Atlantic). He lives in west London with his wife and their two children.

Philippe Sands

vid2Philippe Sands QC is Professor of Law and Director of the Centre for International Courts and Tribunals at University College, London. He is a practising barrister and co-founder of Matrix Chambers, acting in cases before the English courts and international courts and tribunals, including the International Court of Justice. He is the author of Lawless World (2005) and Torture Team (2008) and contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair and The Guardian.

Ellah Allfrey

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Ellah Wakatama Allfrey was Deputy Editor of Granta magazine for four years. Before joining Granta, she was Senior Editor at Jonathan Cape, Random House. Now working as an independent editor and critic, Ellah is Chair of the 2014 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. She serves as deputy chair of the Council of the Caine Prize for African Writing and sits on the board of the Writers’ Centre, Norwich.

Her journalism has appeared in the Telegraph, the Guardian and the Observer and she is a regular contributor to the book pages of NPR. A Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, Ellah was awarded an OBE in 2011 for services to the publishing industry. She is on Twitter: @epwa66

Philip Gwyn Jones

Copyright: Adrian Cook.

Copyright: Adrian Cook.

Philip Gwyn Jones has been an editor and publisher for 25 years. He spent 15 years at HarperCollins, 8 of them as Publisher of Flamingo, before leaving to found the independent house Portobello Books in late 2004, with the backing of philanthropist Sigrid Rausing, a year later acquiring and integrating Granta Books. He left Granta/Portobello in 2013.

He was the first editor to bring British readers writers such as Katherine Boo, Jenny Erpenbeck, Edward Hollis, Naomi Klein, Jhumpa Lahiri, Patrick Ness, and Arundhati Roy. Philip served for 3 years on PEN’s Writers in Translation Committee. He also serves as a Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund.

Nikita Lalwani

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Nikita Lalwani was born in Rajasthan, India, and raised in Cardiff. After spending 10 years in factual television, principally for the BBC, she turned her attention to writing. Her first novel Gifted was short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

She has written on human rights and data protection issues of people suffering from HIV/AIDS in India, in the anthology Aids Sutra. In 2008 she won the Desmond Elliott Prize for Fiction and donated the £10,000 prize money to Liberty. For the past three years, Nikita has been part of Liberty’s policy council.

Charlie King 

Charlie King

Charlie King has spent his career in book publishing as a marketing specialist, working closely with writers to help bring

their work to readers. After spells at Hodder & Stoughton and Pan Macmillan, he is currently Marketing Director at Little, Brown Book Group.

Charlie is extremely proud to serve as a trustee of English PEN, and is particularly interested in advising PEN on communications strategy and on financial and management matters.

Claire Armitstead

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Claire Armitstead is books editor for the Guardian and the Observer, charged with safeguarding the two newspapers’ literary heritage while overseeing the transition to a unified digital-first operation. She was literary editor for the Guardian from 1999-2010, and arts editor from 1995-1999.

During her two years in the job, she has pioneered new ways of championing literature online. Over the last year she has worked closely with the British Council and the Edinburgh International Book Festival to bring the World Writers’ Conference to the widest possible audience. She presents the Guardian books podcast and is a regular speaker on literature on radio and at public events.

Geraldine Proudler proudler

Geraldine Proudler is a media lawyer. She has been defending freedom of expression since the early 1980s when she qualified as a solicitor and began acting for the Guardian. She has acted in a number of high-profile cases, including defending the Guardian against libel claims by Stoke Newington police officers alleged to be corrupt, and Jonathan AItken MP who sued the Guardian when he was a Cabinet Minister over allegations of accepting benefits from Saudi princes.

She was a Trustee of the Scott Trust, which owns and protects the Guardian, for 11 years, before standing down in 2013.

Honorary Vice-Presidents of English PEN:

Lady Rachel Billington; William Boyd; Dame A.S. Byatt CBE; Margaret Drabble CBE; Lady Antonia Fraser CBE; Victoria Glendinning CBE; Ronald Harwood CBE; Sir Michael Holroyd CBE; Ben Okri CBE; Josephine Pullein-Thompson MBE; Sir Tom Stoppard CBE; Claire Tomalin; Raleigh Trevelyan.

 
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