It’s no longer enough to simply publish information in a top-down way, whether in print or online. The Internet has changed the dynamics of information dissemination. With that in mind, the organization English PEN has launched a new initiative called the “English PEN World Atlas” (www.penatlas.org). This is an online resource funded by the Arts Council England linking readers, writers and publishers around the world. For the first year, the focus of the English PEN World Atlas will be writers from the Arab region. The goal of the site is that with a simple mouse click, users of the resource will be able to reveal, find, talk about or engage with the hottest new novelist in Morocco, the most controversial political writer in Algeria or the most exciting poet in Syria.
The English PEN World Atlas website was designed and built by Silence London to incorporate the latest Web 2.0 technology. It allows users to generate content on those who they consider to be the most exciting writers in the world. The site uses a “wiki-style” system that allows users to create profiles of individual writers, and also create content framed by PEN’s strong international networks. The site will generate information on the most popular pages, recently updated pages and the most highly-rated books. The English PEN World Atlas aims to promote literature as a means of intercultural understanding, adding to the internationalism of the English literary arena by bringing world writing to an English language audience.
“Thanks to the confidence of Arts Council England, and the creative genius of Silence London, we are about to see a major leap forward in literary relations between English-speaking readers and the rest of the world,” said Jonathan Heawood, director of English PEN. “Literature can build bridges like no other art form – and we need those bridges now more than ever.”
English PEN (www.englishpen.org) is the founding center of the worldwide writers association, International PEN, which has 145 PEN centers in 104 countries. The English PEN World Atlas is the organization’s latest attempt to harness the power of literature as a means of international dialogue. However, since 2004, English PEN’s Writers in Translation program has championed writers from outside Britain whose work is published in translation.
The organization offers grants up to 4,000 GBP for promoting and marketing a work that is translated into English and published by a UK publisher. The group also offers grants of 250 GBP to pay for a reader’s report and sample translation for writers whose work has not found a UK publisher. Twenty titles have been supported by English PEN’s Writers in translation program including: “The Yacoubian Building,” by Alaa Al Aswany, “Being Arab,” by Samir Kassir, “An Afghan Journey,” by Roger Willemsen, “Touba and the Meaning of Night,” by Sharnush Parsipur and “State of Emergency,” by Soleiman Adel Guemar.
