UEL English PEN Society

As Fresher's Fair comes to an end I'd just like to recap the last few days. It has been absolutely amazing to see that many societies together at University of East London and this was the first year when I can honestly say UEL's improving.

We'd like to thank to everyone who joined the UEL English PEN Society and to everyone who stopped by our stall on any day we were there - we all hope you learned new things and we'll hopefully see you really soon.

We are still looking for new recruits so please don't be scared to get in touch with us on uelenglishpen@gmail.com if you're interested in holding more responsibility, but also having more fun!

We captured many moments during Fresher's Fair, which can be found on our Facebook page!

To all the freshers: we hope you had a fantastic week and have learned a lot, not only about English PEN but also about University of East London. Good luck with your future studies and we hope to catch you in one of our meetings!
(Here's a sneek peek of our stall with Sam and Mandy!)

• Empty Chair Evenings and Open Mic Nights Someone sits in a chair and reads out the banned work of a foreign writer, in order to release their words into the world.  We’ll also hold nights where students and staff are welcome to read out their work as part of our Open Mic nights.
• Letter Writing Workshops and Meet-Ups We all write to writers who have been incarcerated, imprisoned, or put under house arrest for their work, expressing our support for them and appreciation of their work, in order to boost morale.
• Petitioning Parliament for changes to laws in the UK and abroad with regards to free speech, libel laws and human rights.
• Work alongside the UK’s other student PEN groups, to increase exposure of issues and the work we’re doing, as well as creating a UK-wide support network for our societies.
• Book sales and raffles in which we raise money for PEN using books that have been donated to us (so far, we have around 300!)
• Championing the work that English PEN does with prisoners and refugees, and within their translation programme, which enables obscure works from all over the world to become available to as wide a platform of readers and thinkers as possible.