Committee Chairs

Nominated by the members of each committee and ratified by the Executive Committee.

Salil Tripathi lives in London and was born in India. His books include Offence: The Hindu Case (Seagull, 2009), about censorship by Hindu nationalists, and two forthcoming titles - a collection of travel essays (Tranquebar, 2011) and a book about the corporate scandal at Satyam Computers in India (Westland, 2011). He chairs English PEN's Writers in Prison Committee.

Salil has written extensively on politics, economics, literature, business, and on issues related to free speech for over 25 years in publications around the world. He has been a foreign correspondent based in Singapore and Hong Kong during the 1990s and was a correspondent in India before that. He has frequently written for The Wall Street Journal, The Independent, The New Statesman, Index on Censorship, The International Herald Tribune, Far Eastern Economic Review, The New Republic, and The Washington Post, among others. In India, he is a columnist at Mint and contributing editor at Caravan magazine. He also writes for Global Asia in Seoul and The National in Abu Dhabi. He was among the winners of the Citibank Pan Asia Journalism Award in 1994, and the Asian Award for Excellence in Magazine Writing in 1989.

In a parallel universe, he is policy director at the Institute for Human Rights and Business. He has been a non-resident fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School on business and human rights, and is on the advisory panels of major global initiatives on human rights and business. He graduated with a masters' degree from the Tuck School at Dartmouth College in the United States, and a bachelor's degree from the University of Bombay in India.

Chair of the Readers and Writers Committee: 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.

Chair of the Writers in Translation Committee: 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.