Board of Trustees 2007

  

Lisa Appignanesi, President:  Lisa Appignanesi is a novelist, writer, and broadcaster. Mad, Bad and Sad, her cultural history of women and the mind doctors was published by Virago/Little Brown in February 2008. Her fictions include the prize-winning The Memory Man (Arcadia ), the bestselling psychological thrillers Sanctuary and The Dead of Winter (Bantam); her non-fiction, the acclaimed family memoir, Losing the Dead (Chatto), as well as The Cabaret (Yale). She is the co-author of Freud's Women (Penguin) and co-editor of The Rushdie File. She also edited Free Expression is No Offence (Penguin,2006) a collection which served in PEN's campaign against the incitement to religious hatred legislation.  A former university lecturer and Deputy Director of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, she has also made several programmes for television and radio, presenting BBC 3's Night Waves. She is General Editor of Profile Books Big Ideas series. As a translator from the French, she won the Scott Moncrieff prize for literary translation, with John Berger, for The Year is 42.  She is a Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres and Chair of the Freud Museum.

Hari Kunzru, Deputy President:  Hari Kunzru is a novelist and journalist. He is the author of The Impressionist (2002, winner of the Betty Trask and Somerset Maugham awards) and Transmission (2004). In 2003 he was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. He is a patron of the Refugee Council, 104.4 Resonance FM, a member of the Guantanamo Human Rights Commission, and sits on the editorial board of Mute magazine ("art and politics after the net" online at www.metamute.com).  As a former Associate Editor of UK Wired magazine (and one time freelancer for many other technology-oriented publications) he has a long-standing interest in the political and cultural impact of the internet on censorship and freedom of expression. He was Observer young travel writer of the year for 1999 and recently completed a trip to Assam to view IDP camps as a guest of Médecins sans Frontières. His website is www.harikunzru.com/hari. Selected journalism and fiction is available on his website, from publications including The Guardian, The Observer, Independent, London Review of Books, The Saturday Telegraph magazine, The Sunday Times, Wired, Zembla, Mute, Arena, Time Out.


Nadeem Aslam Nadeem Aslam was born in Pakistan in 1966 and moved to the UK as a teenager, his family settling in Huddersfield. He studied Biochemistry at the University of Manchester, but left to become a writer. His first novel, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), won a Betty Trask Award and the Authors' Club First Novel Award, and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award. His second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), which took 11 years to write, won the 2005 Encore Award and the 2005 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. His third, The Wasted Vigil, will be published in September 2008.

 

Ania Corless Ania Corless was born in 1948 in Stratford-on-Avon. She was educated at St Mary's Convent School, Ealing, West London. She was awarded her MA English Literature, from Trinity College, Dublin. She has taught English Literature and been a film interpreter. She is also a translator (for Parliament and Reuters). She was briefly a journalist for a local Kensington paper. She has been a literary agent for twenty years with David Higham Associates.

Jan Dalley:  Jan Dalley is the Arts Editor of the Financial Times, and was previously the Literary Editor at the same paper. Other jobs in journalism - on the Independent on Sunday and the Observer - followed a stint in general publishing, mainly at Chatto & Windus. She writes reviews and articles on books and the arts, and has acted as a judge for the Booker, the Whitbread and other literary prizes. Her biography of Diana Mosley was published by Faber & Faber in 1999, and her latest book - The Black Hole: Money, Myth and Empire - is published by Fig Tree/Penguin in June 2006. She has three children and lives in London.

Julian Evans Julian Evans works as a writer and literary critic with a broad range of interests. Apart from writing in the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Prospect magazine and the French quarterly L'Atelier du Roman, he has written and presented many radio documentaries on literary subjects, including Radio 3's 20-part series on the European novel, The Romantic Road (2000-2). Julian has long been convinced of the necessity for an independent literature and the independence of writers - one of his first pieces for the Guardian was an essay on Russian literature after perestroika. In 2005 he contributed to Free Expression is No Offence, English PEN's collection of essays in defence of free expression, and for the last three years he has acted as Deputy Chair of English PEN's Writers in Translation committee. He translates from French and German and is a founding member of the Comité pour la Francophonie Littéraire, an international group of writers dedicated to maintaining the links between francophone writers and readers. Julian is currently writing the authorised biography of the writer Norman Lewis, to be published by Jonathan Cape in 2008.

 

Lennie Goodings:  Lennie Goodings is the Publishing Director of Virago Press. She is dedicated to raising PEN's profile in the publishing community, with particular emphasis on building recognition for English PEN's unique portfolio of prizes. 

 

Amanda Hopkinson 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. 

 

Derek Johns:  Derek Johns has been with A P Watt as a literary agent and director since 1992. In 1997 he was appointed joint managing director. In a wide-ranging career he has been variously a bookseller, novelist, editor and publisher. He began his publishing career as an editor at Random House in New York. He returned to London in 1986 to take up the position of Publishing Director of Harrap. He went on to be Managing Director of both The Bodley Head and Granta. As a literary agent he specializes in literary fiction (a category in which his clients have either won or been shortlisted for all the major prizes over the past few years) and general non-fiction, particularly narrative non-fiction in the areas of history, biography and travel. In January 2003 Derek was elected President of the Association of Authors' Agents, a post in which he serves a two-year term. Derek published Wintering with Portobello Books in January 2007.  

 

Barry Kernon, Honorary Treasurer:  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.

 Trevor Mostyn Trevor Mostyn runs the Journalist Fellowship Programme at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University's Department of Politics. He read Arabic and Persian at Edinburgh after hitch-hiking to India and Afghanistan. He was Middle East correspondent for The Tablet, deputy Cairo correspondent for the Financial Times and Macmillan Publishers Middle East manager. He founded the European Union's Med Media and Peace Media Programmes (1990-96) to promote Arab-Israeli-European ties. His published books include Censorship in Islamic Societies, Coming of Age in the Middle East, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Middle East and North Africa and Egypt's Belle Époque. He has written for many newspapers. As a member of the Writers in Prison Committee he has covered Saad Eddin Ibrahim's trial in Egypt, visited the Chernobyl region of Belarus with Carole Seymour-Jones in support of Professor Bandazhevsky and helped secure the safety of a Congo-Brazzaville asylum seeker.

Lindsay Mackie Lindsay Mackie was a journalist for The Guardian, specialising in race and home affairs, film critic with The Herald and arts feature writer with The Scotsman. She subsequently worked on Hansard campaigns with Lord Lester, young people's citizenship campaigns, an education campaign to set up Reading for Pleasure clubs in secondary schools and Reading for Pleasure seminars for schools at The Guardian Newsroom. She is currently working with UK Film Council on a programme to set up film clubs in all UK schools.

 

Caroline Michel:  Caroline Michel began her career in publishing at Chatto & Windus, before becoming part of the team that launched Bloomsbury Publishing. She then moved to Orion, after which she ran Vintage paperbacks at Random House for ten years. Having served as the Managing Director of the William Morris agency in the UK, she now works for PFD. Caroline sits on the board of the British Film Institute and on the Man Booker Prize advisory committee.

 

Deborah Moggach, Chair of the Events Committee:  Deborah Moggach has written 15 novels, including Tulip Fever, Porky and her latest, These Foolish Things. Her TV screenplays include Final Demand, Close Relations, Love in a Cold Climate and the prize-winning Goggle Eyes. She has also written two books of short stories. Her movie adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightley, Donald Sutherland and Judi Dench, was released in 2006. She's a former member of PEN executive (twice), a former Chairman of the Society of Authors, and a Fellow of the RSL.

 

Ros Scwartz Ros Schwartz has been a translator from French for 26 years and has more than 50 works of fiction and non-fiction to her name. She is particularly interested in bringing the writing of African and North-African Francophone authors to the English-reading public and has translated novels by Andrée Chedid, Aziz Chouaki, Fatou Diome, Yasmina Khadra, Ousmane Sembène and Fettouma Touati. She is a member of the Writers in Translation Committee and would like to become more involved in PEN's work. She currently holds the positions of Chair of CEATL (the European Council of Literary Translators Associations) and Chair of the advisory panel to the British Centre for Literary Translation.

Anne Sebba:  Anne Sebba started her working life as a foreign correspondent for Reuters, in London and Rome. While living for two years in New York she started writing her first book, a History of Samplers. Since then she has written 8 books including biographies of Enid Bagnold, Laura Ashley, Mother Teresa and William Bankes, The Exiled Collector and a History of Women Reporters called Battling For News. Her biography of Jennie Churchill, Winston's American mother, is due for publication in Autumn 2007 in London and New York. She has also written short stories, introductions to republished novels and regular feature articles for The Times, The Mail, the Financial Times and The Times Higher Education Supplement among others. From c.1994 - 2004 she sat on the Writers in Prison Committee of English PEN, during which time she organised a number of fundraising events, attended trials in Turkey and wrote articles publicising cases of imprisoned or threatened writers. She was a member of the Executive of English PEN from 2001-4.

 

Carole Seymour-Jones, Chair of the Writers in Prison Committee:  Carole was born in Wales and read history at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, subsequently taking an MA at Sussex University. Her most recent book is Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, first wife of T.S. Eliot, also published in the US where she was awarded a Paul Mellon Visiting Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.  Previously Carole wrote a biography of Beatrice Webb, and an official centenary history of The World YWCA. She has written on refugees and homelessness for Heinemann Educational. Carole reviews regularly for the Literary Review, and has published in the New Statesman and THES. While her three children were young, she taught History to adults in Surrey University's extra-mural department, and in sixth form college. A long-standing member of English PEN, she served on the Executive Committee 1997-2001, and on the Books to Prisoners Committee. She joined the WiPC in 2001, and recently undertook a mission to Belarus on behalf of Prof Yury Bandazhevsky. She is currently researching a joint life of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir for Century.

    

Gillian Slovo:  South African born Gillian Slovo is the author of a family memoir, Every Secret Thing, and ten novels, the latest of which, Ice Road, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She is also co-compiler of the play Guantanamo - Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. A long term member of the South African ANC, her family came to Britain in 1964, following exile. She has been a trustee of the Canon Collins Educational Trust for Southern Africa and has written about the Truth and Reconciliation process. She lives in London with her husband and daughter. Her publications include: Morbid Symptoms (Pluto, 1984) Death by Analysis (Women's Press, 1986) Death Comes Staccato (Women's Press, 1987) Ties of Blood (Michael Joseph, 1989) The Betrayal (Michael Joseph, 1991) Façade (Michael Joseph, 1993) Catnap (Michael Joseph, 1994) Close Call (Michael Joseph, 1995) Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country (Little, Brown, 1997) Red Dust (Virago, 2000) Ice Road (Little, Brown, 2004).

 

Tom Stacey:  Tom Stacey has visited and written about 116 countries, many of them several times, mostly in his former role as a newspaperman as the Sunday Times's chief foreign correspondent, and a winner of the Correspondent of the Year award, but also as a novelist and travel-writer, winning the John Llewellyn Rhys prize. Tom's latest book, published in October 2005, was titled Tribe: The Hidden History of the Mountains of the Moon, An Autobiographical Study.