Readers & Writers

Readers & Writers is a writer-led education programme that aims to give refugees, offenders, detainees and young people in schools transformative creative writing and reading experiences and the chance to explore their responses to literature and free speech.

For ten years we have sent writers in to prisons and schools to lead inspiring and transformative workshops, promoting a love of literature, improving literacy and motivating readers and writers who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

For the last two years, Readers & Writers has also pioneered new work with refugee and asylum seeker groups, running innovative creative writing and reading workshops in refugee centres in London. Read the latest books - written by the refugees, asylum seekers and migrants we work with.

Director of PEN, Jonathan Heawood, writes: "The freedom to write and the freedom to read are not simply abstract civil rights: they become meaningful when they are used by individual, often disempowered, citizens. Our developing programme of work with refugee and migrant groups, our work in prisons and within the citizenship curriculum, embodies our awareness that speech is powerful, and that citizens need the capability to exercise it."

Find out more about our literature and free speech education work:

Our work in prisons and detention centres

Our work with new communities

Our work with free speech education