Harry Ransom Center Receives Government Grant to Digitize Archives of PEN International & English PEN

Publishers Weekly reports that the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin has received a $195,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support a two-year project to organize, digitize and open the archives of PEN International and English PEN.

Dubbed “Writers Without Borders," the project will convert some 100,000 documents from the years 1912 to 2008; the documents address PEN's core issues, including the plight of imprisoned writers, free speech and international human rights.

The documents are also coming from a time period covering several flash-points when writers were in peril, such as during World War I and World War II. Among the authors who have correspondence featured in the archive are Chinua Achebe, Elizabeth Bowen, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Nadine Gordimer, Günter Grass, James Joyce, Arthur Miller, Octavio Paz, Salman Rushdie, Aung San Suu Kyi, Virginia Woolf and W. B. Yeats. Some 4,400 images will be also digitized and made free to use online.

That the grant comes just as the Trump administration has announced plans to potentially defund and eliminate the NEH and NEA is "entirely coincidental," said Steve Enniss, director of the Ransom Center. “These archives offer unique insight into human rights crises and document important cultural, historical and literary debates of the last century. There has been demand from scholars to have better access to these documents and their digitization has been a top priority for some time."

What's in the Pen Archives? offers details on the unparalleled resource:

The collection contains more than 100,000 letters exchanged between officers, members, and individual centers, documenting major issues and priorities for the organization as well as the challenges of carrying forward day-to-day operations. The archive contains lengthy runs of correspondence by PEN founder, Catharine Amy Dawson Scott, and former PEN presidents and general secretaries including John Galsworthy, Hermon Ould, Storm Jameson, David Carver, and Arthur Miller. The PEN records also preserve a global correspondence from writers including Chinua Achebe, Elizabeth Bowen, John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, Havelock Ellis, Robert Frost, Nadine Gordimer, Günter Grass, Radclyffe Hall, Václav Havel, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis, Lin Yutang, George Orwell, Alan Paton, Octavio Paz, George Bernard Shaw, John Steinbeck, Aung San Suu Kyi, Dylan Thomas, H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, Thornton Wilder, Virginia Woolf, and W. B. Yeats.

Read more at PW.