The 2025 PEN Lecture with Kamila Shamsie
Event information
Where: Culture Lab, Newcastle University, NE1 7RU
Date: Thursday 19 June
Time: 6-7:30pm
Cost: £10
Type: Talk
English PEN’s annual PEN Lecture invites a leading writer to reflect on the current state of free expression, and to explore the resonance – or dissonance – of the words of the PEN Charter, the guiding principles of the PEN movement, with our current reality.
The 2025 PEN Lecture will be delivered by award-winning novelist Kamila Shamsie, who will discuss what place the principles of the PEN Charter hold in this current era of upheaval and conflict, and what hope they can offer us for the future.
Kamila Shamsie is the author of eight novels, including Best of Friends, Burnt Shadows, Kartography, and Home Fire which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2018). A Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature and former Vice President of English PEN, she grew up in Karachi and now lives in London and in Doha where she is the inaugural Writer in Residence at Georgetown University in Qatar. Her novels have been translated into over 30 languages.
The 2025 PEN Lecture is hosted in partnership with New Writing North and the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, with support from Gem Arts.
Book sales and signing with Forum Books after the event.
Chaired by Preti Taneja, NCLA.