Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 16, Issue 3, 2011

The PEN Club formed in London in 1921 as a dinner circle for writers. Though its founders preferred to emphasize the Club’s cultural significance, this article tracks PEN’s politicization during its first decade. A Cornish novelist named C.A. Dawson Scott proposed the Club as a way to heal the rifts of World War I. British writers of sufficient stature would meet monthly giving writers from abroad a forum to meet their British cou Read More

This article focuses on prevailing views on literary internationalism and the way it was institutionally organised and developed in the Belgian PEN Club. The organisation of the Belgian PEN and the way internationalism was set up there cannot be discussed independently of developments in the rest of the international intellectual field. It was an ‘entangled history’. I have limited myself to a comparison with other countries and lit Read More

In 1923 a few leading Dutch writers took the initiative of founding a dining club, a private society of kindred spirits and their guests who regularly dine together and discuss their shared interests. The model for this Letterkundige Kring (Literary Circle) was the PEN Club in London, established two years previously, which was an association of Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors and Novelists that endeavoured to set up a branc Read More

PEN Nederland, the Dutch PEN Club, was set up at a time when the field of literature in the Netherlands was gaining greater structure: authors’ associations were being formed, which can be seen as a sign of cautious professionalisation, and all sorts of processes of distinction were appearing. In this regard, PEN Nederland can be considered a civil society in which people unite voluntarily around shared interests, aim Read More

Three separate PEN Clubs were founded in Spain during the turbulent period between the wars. The first Spanish PEN Club met for the first time in the celebrated Madrid restaurant Lhardy on 5th July 1922, precisely nine months after the International PEN Club was set up in London. It did not have its own accommodation, but gathered roughly once a month in this restaurant under the chairmanship of the renowned writer Jos Read More