Contents
- Annual General Meeting (AGM)
- Upcoming event
- Newsflash – support for Salman Rushdie
- Achievements and other happenings
Annual General Meeting (AGM) 2022
Date: 5:30PM, 15/SEPT/2022
Address: Centre for Stories (100 Aberdeen St, Northbridge, 6003)
All members and prospective members are welcome but only members can vote. The agenda for the AGM is as follows:
1. Attendance, proxies and apologies
Members unable to attend may appoint another member to serve as their proxy at the meeting; please notify the Secretary at dennis.haskell@uwa.edu.au in advance or bring a letter signed by the member to the meeting. Members unable to attend may send apologies to the Secretary or present them through another member at the meeting.
2. Minutes of AGM, 26 August, 2021
3. Business arising
4. Reports for the period 1 July 2021 to 30 June 2022: Chair’s report; Financial report; Writers in prison report
5. Appointment of interim chair. A chair will be appointed to conduct the Elections.
6. Election of Office Bearers and Committee members: the current committee comprises Frances An (Communications Co-ordinator), Rania Ghandour, Dennis Haskell (Secretary), Christopher Lin (Burma/Myanmar Co-ordinator), Dan Midalia (Treasurer), and Krishna Sen (Writers in Prison Co-ordinator), Caroline Wood (Centre for Stories Co-ordinator).
Dennis Haskell is retiring but others are willing to serve again; however, new committee members would be valuable and nominations, including self-nominations, are strongly encouraged. These should be sent to the Secretary at dennis.haskell@uwa.edu.au. Co-options to the Committee after the meeting are also possible.
Upcoming event – Jenny Rowena in conversation with Krishna Sen
Immediately after the AGM, Jenny Rowena and Krishna Sen join us to discuss the disintegration of democracy in India.
Dr Jenny Rowena teaches English Literature at Miranda House, one of the oldest and most respected women’s colleges in Delhi. She is also the wife of Dr Hany Babu, Ass. Prof of Linguistics at Delhi University, who has been detained since 2020, along with more than a dozen other public intellectuals, lawyers and journalists on spurious charges of fomenting mass violence that broke out on 1 January 2018 in the village of Koregaon.
India was once regarded as the beacon of democracy. Under the Prime Minister Modi, it has gained the dubious reputation of being one of the most dangerous places on earth for working journalists (according to Reporters without Borders). PEN International 2021 Writers in Prison Report notes that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Government regularly uses ‘harassment, surveillance and long-term imprisonment’ to crackdown on political opposition and the independent media.
This event is a Zoom interview and will be livestreamed to registered online attendees via a private YouTube stream. Registration is essential.
Register here for in-person attendance of this event and here for online-only.
Newsflash – Support for Salman Rushdie
The PEN centres in Australia – Perth, Sydney and Melbourne – are concerned about the attack on Salman Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution. The author has been living under a fatwa declared by an Iranian cleric and calling for his death since his novel The Satanic Verses was published in the late 1980s.
See Mansour Razaghi from PEN Sydney’s statement ‘We stand with Salman Rushdie’ for an insightful analysis of the situation surrounding the Rushdie incident.
See PEN International’s condemnation of the attack on Salman Rushdie.
Achievements and other happenings
PEN Perth on YouTube
Our fabulous intern Justine McGinnis has been populating PEN Perth’s YouTube account. Please subscribe to us for more information about PEN Perth’s mission, poetry readings and event recordings.
Poetry from the silenced readings
On 7AUG2022, we had some readings of poetry from imprisoned poets such as Angel Cuadra (Cuba), Arnon Nampha (Thailand), Varavara Rao (India) among others. Thank you to our readers and attendees for making this wonderful event.
35th Commemoration Of Vice Admiral Hoang Co Minh and Heroes of Dong Tien
3:30PM. 28/AUG/2022
PEN Perth member Frances An will attend the 35th Commemoration Of Vice Admiral Hoang Co Minh and Heroes of Dong Tien at Girrawheen Senior Citizens Centre.
After the Fall of Saigon in 1975, Hoang Co Minh established the foundations for a long-term democracy movement against the Vietnamese communist regime. In 1982 he founded the Vietnam Reform Revolutionary Party or Viet Tan along the Laos–Thailand border and was elected as its first chairman. Inspired by the vision of Hoang Co Minh and his sacrifice for the movement, Viet Tan continues to this day as the leading Vietnamese pro-democracy opposition party. See here for more information.
Thank you to Mr. Cao Hoai Tran for inviting Frances to this important event. Mr Tran is a Vietnamese teacher for the Vietnamese Community in Australia (Western Australian chapter) and Western Australian representative of the Vietnamese diasporic pro-democracy group Viet Tan. Here is another reflection on a similar commemorative event in San Jose in 2001, written by Lan Hoang Nguyen.
PEN’s International Annual Congress
The three Australian PEN centres sent $3000 to support the attendance of PEN Cambodia’s representative (Yorn Young) at PEN’s annual international Congress. We hope to hear our PEN Cambodia representative’s report after the Congress.
PEN Perth 