Women Writers Committee

The International PEN Women Writers' Committee (IPWWC) was created in 1991 to support and promote particular issues experienced and identified by women writers. Today, it is significant in its representation of women and their rights within the International PEN community, as well as working with other organisations around the world to protect the Committee's priorities.

Women face particular challenges to engaging with reading and writing; from unequal access to resources, to caring responsibilites, to the fact that there are some countries in which a book by a woman author has never been published. The IPWWC aims to support the development of women writers and encourages the participation of it's members across all areas of International PEN's work from interaction with the Writers in Prison and Translation and Linguistic Rights Committees and the regional development and literary programmes. Representatives of the Committee attend meetings of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, and have been involved with human rights cases involving women writers including Nawal El Saadawi of Egypt and María Elena Cruz Varela and Marta Beatriz Roque of Cuba.

The IPWWC is currently active in over 70 PEN Centres, with members from a diverse range of ethnic and linguistic groups. Its priorities are to ensure women inform all areas of International PEN's programmatic and strategic work, and to establish innovative programmes in target regions where women do not have equality of access. It stages a bi-annual conference the last of which took place in Dakar July 2007.

The Committee sends out two newsletters a year in English, French and Spanish and publishes an anthology of women writers, ‘Our Voice', of which there are four volumes. For more information about IPWWC and to sign up to the newsletter visit www.ipwwc.org

Chair

The current chair is based in Melbourne, Dr Judith Buckrich, Vice President of the Melbourne PEN Centre. Read more about Judith Buckrich.