17/12/2013

Why you should consider joining a worldwide campaigning force that can change unjust laws and protect our fellow writers.

“PEN isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity.” Margaret Atwood

The life of a writer in the UK can feel like a beleaguered one, what with concerns about threats to copyright, dwindling royalties, unfavourable contracts and increased piracy. Get a group of writers together, and it often seems that we have much to complain and worry about. But let’s just press pause on our concerns for a moment, and consider this. At least we have the freedom to write more or less what we like.

It’s a state of affairs we are so accustomed to in the UK that we routinely take it for granted. In many countries, however, the freedom to write is one that can still only be dreamt of. Consider the case of Chinese poet and human rights defender Liu Xiaobo, currently serving an 11-year prison sentence for his dissident writings and peaceful activism. Or of Le QuocQuan, a Vietnamese blogger and human rights activist arrested in December 2012 on a trumped-up charge of tax evasion and sentenced to 30 months in prison. Or that of Cameroonian poet and activist, Enoh Meyomesse, currently appealing against a seven-year prison sentence on charges believed to be politically motivated, and who is continuing to write while incarcerated, despite measures being taken to prevent him.

These are just three of the many persecuted writers whose right to free expression English PEN is currently helping to defend. Over the past year or so, PEN has successfully campaigned for the release of more than 40 imprisoned writers, including Azerbaijani editor, Eynulla Fatullayev and British author Alan Shadrake, jailed in Singapore after publishing a book that was critical of the country’s justice system. Through its members, PEN has also provided moral support to hundreds more, from Syria to Mexico and Burma to Colombia.

English PEN also does important work in the UK, running creative writing and reading workshops led by professional writers in prisons, refugee centres and schools. It promotes overseas fiction in translation through an annual prize and a world literature grant programme. It holds events and talks throughout the year, showcasing the work of new writers, and writers less familiar to a UK audience. And there are its two legendary annual shindigs: the Summer Party, and the hotly contested PEN Quiz.

Established 92 years ago, English PEN was the founding centre for what is now a network of 145 PEN groups in more than 100 countries worldwide (a PEN group is now being set up in Burma, a tribute to the organisation’s work there). The organisation describes itself as a “solidarity of writers”, united in their belief in the freedom to write and the freedom to read. English PEN’s Deputy Director, Heather Norman Sӧderlind looks back on 2013 as something of a landmark year for the charity, both at home and abroad:

“One of our biggest achievements here in the UK, was our success in getting a new Defamation Act on the statute books, due to become law at the beginning of 2014. It took four years of hard work with Index on Censorship and Sense About Science to force a cross-party review of our draconian libel laws. Despite this victory, however, the campaign continues, as the law is not currently due to be adopted in Northern Ireland, prompting concerns that the province will become a focus of libel tourism. So we are continuing to lobby Northern Ireland ministers in the hope that they too will adopt the new bill.”

Turkey was a big focus of English’s PEN’s international work during 2013, and along with Vietnam, will continue to be so during 2014. As the country continues to push for greater ties with Europe, many of its writers, academics, translators and publishers still face censorship, intimidation and worse for their work. Among the Turkish writers whose cases PEN is currently supporting is the celebrated Turkish pianist and writer Fazil Say. “It’s interesting how the concept of writing has moved on from simply being about those who publish books, to encompass songwriters,” says Sӧderlind.

There is no more high-profile songwriting case than that of the outlawed Russian female punk rock band, Pussy Riot. During 2013, English PEN was vociferous in the campaign against the imprisonment of its band members for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” after a protest in Moscow Cathedral. PEN’s innovative response included 'Poems for Pussy Riot' in which poets worldwide were invited to write creative responses to the case. Within weeks there had been more than 100 submissions, which were posted as daily tributes on the PEN website, and later published as an e-book and print-on-demand paperback. Says Sӧderlind: “I think our campaign was a bit of a breakthrough: we are in a new era in terms of how to reach out to people, and this was a campaign largely orchestrated via social media.” As a result, some of the band members who were not imprisoned sought support from English PEN, which has become a trusted ally, to arrange meetings for them in the UK to meet the press and key supporters.

In the wake of the Edward Snowden affair, the issue of surveillance is set to be a crucial subject of debate in 2014. English PEN has recently launched a legal challenge against the actions of GCHQ with Big Brother Watch and the Open Rights Group and has filed papers at the European Court of Human Rights, bringing an action against the UK government. PEN is also backing 'Writers Against Mass Surveillance' a new appeal which has already garnered more than 500 signatures from writers worldwide including Nobel Prize for Literature Laureates Orhan Pamuk, JM Coetzee and Günter Grass, along with Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo and Bjӧrk. The appeal demands a binding ‘International Bill of Digital Rights’ and calls upon the United Nations to enforce fundamental democratic rights such as the presumption of innocence and the right to privacy in the digital realm. It states: “A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy. To maintain any validity, our democratic rights must apply in virtual as in real space.”

“I think it will be very interesting for us to research cases where writers have felt prevented from writing something online because of surveillance,” comments Sӧderlind. “It’s another major issue where we are beginning to collect our thoughts. We must always be forward-thinking and digitally knowledgable because we are as much an organisation for those who write online as for those on the physical page.”

During 2014, PEN plans to continue to monitoring the situation in Russia with Pussy Riot – at the time of writing, there are rumours that the imprisoned members of the band will be released as part of a Kremlin amnesty. And of particular interest to Welsh writers is the planned establishment next year of PEN Wales, with the collaboration of Welsh poet and novelist, Owen Sheers.

I joined English PEN last year, and my £3.75 a month membership fee seems a very modest price to pay to support fellow writers who unlike me, work daily in a climate of hostility, censorship and sometimes outright persecution. Heather Norman Sӧderlind sums up the benefits of membership thus: “We are a worldwide community, a campaigning force of writers that can change unjust laws and protect our fellow writers. By joining us you will become part of that solidarity, and also help bring the gift of writing and reading to disadvantaged people in the UK."

To continue its work, English PEN relies upon subscriptions and donations from its membership alongside important contributions from Arts Council England, corporate sponsors which include leading UK publishers, trusts and foundations and individuals who contribute more substantially.

For more information about the work of English PEN, please see the website, www.englishpen.org. Other benefits of membership include a quarterly magazine, regular e-bulletins, invitations to social events and an exciting programme of member events.

Case History: Iryna Khalip

Journalist Iryna Khalip, correspondent for Belarus newspaper Novaya Gazeta was arrested in December 2010, following presidential elections that resulted in Alexander Lukashenko winning a fourth term amid protests against election fraud. Beaten by the police, held in isolation for a month, then placed under house arrest with two KGB agents in residence, Iryna was found guilty of 'activities severely disruptive of public order' in May 2011 and given a two year suspended sentence. 

English PEN members played an active part in the campaign for her release, writing letters to the Belarus government and to Iryna herself while she was in custody. In July this year, three and a half years after her arrest, the sentence against her was dropped. In October she arrived in London to accept the PEN/Pinter International Writer of Courage award which she shared with Tom Stoppard. Movingly, in her acceptance speech, she said:

"When I was in prison and then under house arrest and held incommunicado I didn’t know that hundreds of letters and postcards in support and solidarity were mailed to me. Only later I read them all, a big pile of letters almost all of which began with the words: 'I learned from English PEN that you are under house arrest. I want you to know that we here in England express our solidarity and pray for you.' …Those letters and postcards post-stamped in Great Britain helped me a lot. I still keep these letters and will keep them forever. And the gratitude to English PEN will forever be in my heart."

Special offer for ALCS Members:

18 months PEN membership for special offer rate of £50 (London) or £45 (Country/Overseas)

English PEN is offering ALCS Members the opportunity to become PEN members at a special offer rate of 18 months’ membership for the price of 12 months if you take out a membership before 1st May 2014. You may pay the subscription in monthly or quarterly instalments over 12 months if you wish.

To qualify for the special rate, please register online at

www.englishpen.org/membership/join/

At the same time, please send an email to PEN’s Jenna Mason jenna@englishpen.org quoting ‘ALCS membership offer’ so PEN can extend the benefit of 18 months to your account.

17/12/2013

Author Mal Peet was guest speaker at last month's ALCS AGM in Bristol. Here's his barnstorming speech in full.

"I'm going to read you a story. Or part of a story, anyway. This is the opening of a novel to be published some time next year called The Murdstone Trilogy. It concerns a writer called Philip Murdstone, the author of sensitive, boy-centred teen novels. After some initial success his career is on the skids and his royalties have slowed to a dribble. His agent, Minerva Cinch, summons him to London. Over a dodgy lunch she cajoles and bullies Philip into giving up on his lovely sensitive teen novels and to attempt a Sword and Sorcery Fantasy blockbuster because that’s what teenage boys actually read. Despite his healthy loathing of all things Tolkienesque, Philip succumbs, partly because he fancies the pants off Minerva. He returns to Devon full of regret.

The relevance of all this to the present occasion will, I hope, emerge.

The sun sinks, leaving tatty furbelows of crimson cloud in the Dartmoor sky. From somewhere in the bracken tough, invisible ponies huff and snicker. Final birdcalls: rooks croaking homeward; a robin, hoping for a last territorial dispute before bedtime. Voles scuttle to holes, their backs abristle with fear of Owl. It is early spring. Lambs plead for mothers. Below ground, badgers, ripe and rank with oestrus, prepare themselves for the night’s business. A fox flames its ears and clears its throat.

...because he is broke. Skint. Poor. He is a poor man. A famous – okay, well-known – writer, but a pauper.

Darkness takes possession of the earth and then the sky; now the only light is small and square. It comes from the window of an isolated cottage. To be exact, it comes from a Habitat anglepoise lamp hunched upon a small folding table inside and below the window. The lamp shares the table with a plate upon which tomato sauce has congealed, a bunch of keys and a somewhat out-of-date London A to Z. These things, and the cottage, belong to Philip Murdstone who sits, still wearing his overcoat, gazing into the illusory heat of his coal-effect electric fire. He is holding, and sometimes remembers to drink from, a pint glass containing cloudy cider from the two-gallon plastic container on the floor next to his chair. The false fire sits on the hearth of a gaping fireplace formed from large, irregular blocks of granite. On the mantelpiece a small number of trophies gleam, faintly. One is a slab of glass, or more probably Perspex, the accolade buried within it only readable from an oblique angle. Another is a rather kitsch statuette of a child sitting cross-legged intent upon a book. There are three others, and all five are in need of dusting.For some time now, since well before sunset, Philip Murdstone has been reciting a brutal phrase as if it were a mantra that might console him.It is: "I’m screwed".It has failed to console him.Usually, in his life as well as his fiction, Philip tends to leave the weightier questions unanswered; now, in self-lacerating mode, he addresses them. Or, rather, it. His bitter self-interrogation has resolved itself into a single query: why has he agreed to sell his soul?

He also subscribes to The Author and ALCS News. So he knows what’s going on. Oh yes.

Answer: because he is broke. Skint. Poor. He is a poor man. A famous – okay, well-known – writer, but a pauper. This ugly truth frequently visits him in the dark marches of the night. He tries to deflect it by turning on his bedside radio and losing himself in BBC World Service programmes about leech farming in Cambodia or female circumcision in Nigeria, but it doesn’t always work.His penury had not always dismayed him; there was, after all, an honourable tradition of writers living in poverty. Russian ones, especially. Dying in poverty, however, had less appeal. Dying of poverty had none at all.Philip knows why the sales of his books are in drastic decline. It has nothing at all to do with their quality. He buys the Guardian every Saturday, Brian at the Flemworthy corner shop handing it, in its cellophane sheath, over the counter as if it were a pornographic version of the Dead Sea scrolls. He also subscribes to The Author and ALCS News. So he knows what’s going on. Oh yes.Writers no longer spent time, in solitude, crafting meaningful and elegant prose. No. They spent most of their time on the bloody internet. Blogging and tweeting and updating their sodding Facebook pages and their wretched narcissistic websites.Minerva has mentioned his failure to do likewise on several occasions.

"...What was that? Who said 'copyright'? Drag that nostalgia junkie up here, boys, and break his goddamn fingers."

"But it has nothing to do with real work, Minerva. Surely you can see that.""I do see that, darling. I’m not actually a fool, you know. But it has a very great deal to do with money. Were all looking at download income and peripherals right now. I think you might be getting into a cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face type situation."But he’d refused to do any of it. Not that he was a Luddite, by any means. Not at all. He regularly caught the monthly bus to Tavistock with his handwritten list of Things To Find Out About and spent a good hour, sometimes more, at one of the library’s computers. He considered himself a bit of a dab hand at Googling. That was work. That was useful. The rest of it, though, the incessant, vacuous web-witter … No. No!He’d regarded himself as a dignified – all right, stubborn – refusenik. Until now. Now – what a day of ugly truths it was turning out to be! – he was forced to admit that he had deluded himself. Led himself up his own tiny garden path. The absolute bloody fact of the matter was that he had allowed himself to be left behind. He was like some ancient artificer – a clockmaker, perhaps – who looks up from his bench to discover the world has gone digital and that his days are numbered. Or like a loyal and expert employee who goes to work one day to find that he has been replaced by a bit of software devised by a teenager in Bangalore.He, the award-winning author Philip Murdstone, had become – the very word had a murderous thud in it – redundant.He gulps cider, because even that isn’t the worst of it.Oh no.Because, swelling and looming over the horizon of his own small tragedy, cometh the Ultimate Cataclysm. The ascendancy of the darkly glittering Californian Overlords of Cyberspace, those latter-day Genghiz Khans sweeping civilization aside, burning libraries, impaling editors in long rows, razing ancient honey-coloured colleges and glass towers alike in a venal and rapacious lust to control language, turning authors into drones servicing its throbbing Amazonian hive and children into passive dabbers at electronic tablets,  freeloading downloads. And soon, their philistine conquest achieved, the Overlords will stand there wearing ironically democratic jeans and T-shirts, backlit by a bonfire of royalty statements, surveying the wasteland with their hands on their hips, at the head of a vast phalanx of slobbering intellectual property lawyers, sneering at the last writers still able to crawl. And say "You got a problem, you backward-looking ink-addicted Neanderthals? What was that? Who said 'copyright'? Drag that nostalgia junkie up here, boys, and break his goddamn fingers."As Minerva had rather chirpily reminded him."It’s all going to go pear-shaped when Apple rules the world, darling. So if you’re a writer the only sensible thing to do is make a ton of money before it happens. And you’re a little late off the starting-block, if you don’t mind me saying so."

I energetically deny that The Murdstone Trilogy is an autobiographical novel. How could it be? Philip Murdstone is an impecunious writer of unfashionable teen fiction living on Dartmoor, whereas I live several miles away in Exmouth, which is on the coast.

We do, however, share an aversion to social networking. In Philip’s case, this is because he is, despite his protestations, a Luddite.

In my case, it’s more that I can’t be bothered. This annoys some people, including my publishers who, like most publishers, seem to think that these days it’s the author’s job to market his or her own books. Which, incidentally, calls into question what Marketing and Publicity Departments are actually for. And that, in turn, raises the question of what publishers are for.

But for now, consider the highly unlikely possibility that, on a wet Wednesday morning, I have a sudden and penetrating insight into a pressing social issue; or that an elegant aperçu enters my mind; or an original and beautiful metaphor occurs to me. Would I, or any other writer, whack it onto the web free of charge? No, of course not. We’d hoard it, nourish it, burnish it, then put it into a book. It follows, therefore, that what writers do put on their social networks is second-rate. The wheat goes into the book, the chaff goes online. (And that, by the way, is my mental image of Twitter: a vast cloud of chaff, much of it toxic, obscuring the sky. Okay, I’m wrong, I know. It’s more like birdsong: millions of birds in millions of bushes all going "Here I am! Listen to me! Here I am!" Maybe I’d join in if Twitter were renamed Chirrup. I can just about imagine myself chirruping.)

I have, lately, started to review my early knee-jerk shock-horror reactions to digital publishing and on-line bookselling. I’ve begun to see opportunities as well as threats.

But I’m far too self-effacing, not to mention lazy, to come on like a latter-day Jeremiah, publicly railing against modernity and the whoring after false gods while tearing out my beard and rending my garments. For one thing, rending your garments, especially when you’re wearing them, is not as easy as it sounds. As those of you who have tried it will know. Ditto with beards.

I’m more like one of my fictional heroes:  Herman Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener. Bartleby’s stock response to each novel demand made of him is to say, calmly but implacably, "I would prefer not to."

When I’m told that I must watch this or read that or subscribe to this or update to that, my default is Bartleby’s.

Would you like to "friend" someone you’ve never met?

I’d prefer not to.

Would you like to add to the chaff?  

I’d prefer not to.

A modern Bartleby, of course, would only have to make one mouse-click:

Ask me later.

Unlike poor old doomed Murdstone, I’m not even a paid-up Luddite.

In fact, I have, lately, started to review my early knee-jerk shock-horror reactions to digital publishing and on-line bookselling. I’ve begun to see opportunities as well as threats. Opportunities, for example, to make more than the 9 or 10% royalty you get on horrendously discounted book club print sales. To take over and re-energise one’s neglected backlist. To conduct, via interactive whiteboards or Skype, school visits, seminars, workshops without having to charge prohibitive travel and accommodation expenses, much as I love the odd night in a Travelodge on the outskirts of Stoke on Trent. I’ve even become sanguine about the future of print publishing and bookshops. Sooner or later, publishers will stop running around randomly like headless penguins, let the junk go online, sell their vast inner London office blocks and become smaller, more focused, serious producers of high-quality and assiduously promoted books, artefacts, that they actually believe in.

Everything we say or watch or research or post on the internet is now available to the spooks of the state. I don’t remember voting for this.

And bookshops have nothing to lose but their chains.

For better or worse we live in a changed landscape. The trick, of course, is not to fall for what one might call the Gove Delusion: that change is the same thing as progress. The astonishing commercial success of Fifty Shades of Grey was without doubt a landmark change in the history of publishing, but you’d need a pair of whipped buttocks where your head used to be to see it as progress.

I’d prefer not to.

However  – and this thought has no doubt crossed your minds during the past minutes –  if one does put a hand up and say, even quietly, that not all the effects of technological innovation are good, you lay yourself open to the dread charge of Old Fartism. Of being reactionary, of not getting with the programme. Of denying progress. You find yourself put into the same category as a medieval monk who looks up from illuminating a manuscript to deride the passing fad of printing. Or as the headmaster of my grammar school, who devoted his school assembly addresses to denouncing rock 'n' roll as the ruin of civilisation.

And since no one, not even me, much likes being an Old Fart, we tend to shut up. To acquiesce. And it’s acquiescence that brings me at last to the point of this rambling address, its nub of worry.

The publication of Chelsea Manning’s revelations via Wikileaks and, more recently, the information revealed by Edward Snowden seem to me to be a huge milestone in our cultural and political history. We have discovered that the information superhighway leads to, of all places, Cheltenham. Without consultation or answerability or democratic oversight, the so-called Intelligence Services of the USA and the UK have – with the collusion of the world’s internet service providers – abolished the concept of privacy. Everything we say or watch or research or post on the internet is now available to the spooks of the state. I don’t remember voting for this. I don’t recall being asked if I would be happy to live in an electronic version of East Germany under the Stasi.

The public reaction to the abolition of privacy – in so far as there has been one – was disturbing and depressing. A few notables got shirty, but in general the world let out a sigh of acceptance, gave a shrug as if to say:

"Spies spy – who knew?" or "The technology exists, so of course they’d use it" or

"What can you do? It’s progress, innit?"

Unless we are very careful, this same acquiescence could extend to the matters that concern us here today: threats to copyright and its policing; to the notion of intellectual property; to writers' ownership of their own work and their right to be paid properly and fairly for it. Acquiescence to the erosion of these old-fashioned principles is as great a danger as the active attacks upon them.

Which is why all of us writers – or content-providers, as we now call ourselves – are inexpressibly glad that the ALCS exists and continue to be indebted to it.

I am very grateful for this opportunity to congratulate you on your continued watchfulness, your refusal to accept the unacceptable. To acquiesce.

On behalf of ink-addicted Neanderthals everywhere, and my missus, thank you very much indeed.

More power and sharpness to your elbow.

(Here Mal left the rostrum to wild applause under a shower of quill pens and typewriter ribbons.)"

Mal Peet is the author of several novels for young adults, including Tamar, winner of the 2005 CILIP Carnegie Medal, and Exposure, which won the 2009 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize. His latest novel is Life: An Exploded Diagram.

© Mal Peet

21/10/2013

ALCS and National Schools Partnership Launch 'The Young Writer's Guide to Shakespeare'.

In celebration of the year of William Shakespeare’s 450th birthday year in 2014, ALCS has teamed up with National Schools Partnership to launch 'The Young Writer’s Guide to Shakespeare'.

Devised by teachers for upper KS2 and KS3, this stimulating new copyright education programme aims to breathe fresh air into the teaching of what many students imagine is a difficult-to-grasp subject; whilst also increasing enjoyment of the Bard’s work. Fully mapped to the National Curriculum and free to download, it also introduces students to the concepts of copyright and plagiarism, via lively creative writing and group activities.

'The Young Writer’s Guide to Shakespeare' consists of flexible teachers’ resources, a PowerPoint presentation, and classroom activities including an exploration of comedy, and an imagined courtroom scenario concerning an alleged case of copyright theft from Shakespeare himself.

The new programme also includes a designated microsite with advice on playwriting, including a host of hints from a helpful donkey named Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

And, in an exciting 'Soap Opera Shakespeare' playwriting competition, students will be invited to put quill to parchment – or fingers to keyboard – to create their own Shakespearean style plays, based on the theme of copyright and how it can support creators. Inspirational prompts will be offered by both Bottom and William Shakespeare himself, and the application also includes a random character, theme and scene-setting generator.

Entrants will be in with a chance of winning some excellent prizes for themselves and their schools, including a Kindle Fire HD and £100 of Amazon vouchers; a school visit by a leading author, a Shakespearean class trip or books for the school library.

"In 2012, our 'What the Dickens?' project showed that educational programmes have great potential to improve understanding of the importance of copyright for creators and innovators..."

ALCS hopes that 'The Young Writer’s Guide to Shakespeare' will build on the success of 'What the Dickens?', the previous schools copyright education programme from ALCS and National Schools Partnership. Launched in early 2012 and run in over 1000 schools around the UK, it was themed around the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Research following the project showed that 91% of participating students had gained an increased awareness of what copyright means.

Launching the 'The Young Writer’s Guide to Shakespeare', Barbara Hayes, Deputy CEO of ALCS comments:

“In 2012, our 'What the Dickens?' project showed that educational programmes have great potential to improve understanding of the importance of copyright for creators and innovators, but that more needed to be done to explain to young people what is, and isn’t permissable online.  So I’m delighted that we’re able to launch this dynamic new resource to coincide with Shakespeare’s 450th birthday celebrations and hope we can build on that potential and bring an understanding of copyright to more young people”.

You can read more about our work in copyright education on our website.