2025 PEN Lecture: Kamila Shamsie
Thursday 19 June, 6pm to 8pm
Culture Lab, Newcastle University
English PEN Annual Lecture: Kamila Shamsie
In conversation with award-winning writer, and Director of NCLA, Preti Taneja.
The 2025 PEN Lecture will be delivered by award-winning novelist Kamila Shamsie on 19 June 2025, at the Culture Lab in Newcastle, in partnership with New Writing North and the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts (NCLA).
English PEN’s annual PEN Lecture invites a leading writer to reflect on the current state of free expression, and to explore the resonance – or dissonance – of the words of the PEN Charter, the guiding principles of the PEN movement, with our current reality.
Shamsie will reflect on the PEN Charter, which has guided and unified PEN centres across the world since 1948. Forged from the ashes of World War Two, the PEN Charter calls for the “unhampered transmission of thought”, opposes “mendacious publication, deliberate falsehood, and distortion of facts for political and personal ends”, and affirms that “literature knows no frontiers, and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheaval”. In an era of upheaval and conflict, Shamsie will ask what place these principles hold in our society, and what hope they can offer us for the future.
Kamila Shamsie said: “There is nothing more PEN than regarding the PEN Charter itself as a text that is subject to questioning rather than an immovable set of guidelines. It feels essential to re-examine the Charter’s claim that art ‘should be left untouched by national or political passion’, not merely for the sake of argument but to interrogate the role of writers, and of free expression organisations, in 2025.”
After delivering her lecture, Kamila Shamsie will be in conversation with award-winning writer, and Director of NCLA, Preti Taneja. Taneja is a Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and English PEN Translation Advisory Co-chair.
Preti Taneja, Director of NCLA said: “Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts is committed to presenting the very best in world literature, to discussing the pressing questions of our times with today’s leading writers, and to working with organisations that share our values of global and local equality and inclusivity. We are delighted to partner with English PEN, New Writing North, and GemArts to welcome Kamila Shamsie to Newcastle to discuss the vital subjects of ‘political’ writing and freedom of speech as she brings the PEN Charter into focus for 2025.”
