PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.
PEN Transmissions is a space for amplifying voices across borders and identities. It’s a space in which contributors have an open platform, and where major literary figures sit side by side with pioneering young writers and with emerging voices of any age, creed, experience.
We recognise this need to be capacious. We also recognise the value of focus – of considering the needs for opportunity, dedicated space and a productive zooming-in for particular writing communities. 2024 is the year in which most researchers suggest Generation Alpha will end and a new generation begin; across the year, with the support of the Norman Trust, we look to the previous generation, Gen Z, with a dedicated strand of commissioning for young writers.
While writers can emerge at any age (and while critics of age barriers have rightly recognised the intersectional and material conditions that can prevent individuals from particular communities making a career of writing at a young age), exploring the material conditions from which a given generation of writing emerges can be revealing. Gen Z, raised by the internet and against the backdrop of a climate emergency and geopolitical unrest, is marked by resilience, creativity, and transgressive thinking. In a shrinking landscape for short-form writing, Gen Z authors are reimagining the digital written content we consume, and how we consume it. Young writers are forcing us to rethink the craft, pushing the formal boundaries of existing literary ideas; it’s striking how little of this work is showcased in traditional literary spaces. When researching this series, we noted how many creatives from this generation chose instead to share their work in intimate spaces – social media, personal blogs, group chats – and the response from the writers to whom we have spoken has been complexly heartening: young authors are eager to share their ideas and work, while at the same time are frustrated by a lack of access and editorial engagement to support their early careers.
This series of essays and interviews begins with ‘Relishing in My Pain’, a moving personal essay by poet Simone Yasmin. Each piece will set out to examine the parameters of what we consider literature to be, how established ideas about where it exists are shifting, and how traditional publishing forms are becoming more or less accessible. Filled with honesty, sensitivity, and power, they speak to what the arts sector is today, and what it might become in the following years.
– Nadia Saeed, Co-editor
PEN Transmissions 