New £330,000 Emergency Fund launched to support authors affected financially by Coronavirus 

English PEN and our 152 sister centres are premised on supporting and connecting readers and writers – on ensuring literature remains common currency, even in times of upheaval. 

In the current global health context we face together, our cultural lives are being fundamentally challenged. We also understand the unprecedented strain on the livelihoods of many who work in the arts, and the need for an urgent industry-wide coordinated response. 

To this end, we're proud to be part of a collaboration with the Society of Authors, Royal Literary Fund, the TS Eliot Foundation, Amazon UK, and The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society to establish an emergency fund of £330,000 for writers and literary professionals who need assistance.  

Applications are open to all professional authors who are resident in the UK or British subjects – including all types of writers, illustrators, literary translators, scriptwriters, poets, journalists and others for whom author-related activities make up a substantial amount of their annual income.  

Grants are likely to be up to £2,000 and designed to meet urgent need. The fund will be led on and managed by the Society of Authors. 

Literature knows no frontiers

Literature – with its power to transcend and to sustain – is more vital than ever now. And so, in the coming months, we will be looking to use digital methods to platform for our work. One of these is PEN Transmissions which we will use as an accessible platform for our work: we will publish more content more regularly, commission new voices, and platform conversations with the writers scheduled to participate in our events. We also promise to honour our financial commitments to those speakers too.

In this moment, we are reminded of the words of our first president, John Galsworthy, as he appealed to the PEN membership in the face of the 1928 Bulgarian earthquake: