Thea Dorn replaces Eva Menasse on the board

The writers’ association PEN Berlin elected a new board at a general meeting in Hamburg. The organization confirmed the journalist Deniz Yücel as speaker on Friday evening. The general meeting elected the writer Thea Dorn as the new speaker. She replaces the author Eva Menasse, who has held the office since it was founded in 2022 but did not stand for election again.

The association also welcomed 99 new members, including the bestselling author Frank Schätzing (“The Swarm”), the author and current winner of the German Book Prize, Martina Hefter (“Hey, good morning, how are you?”), the Sociologist Steffen Mau, the musician Sebastian Krumbiegel (“The Princes”) and the actor Ulrich Matthes. PEN Berlin now has around 730 members, making it “the authors’ association with the largest number of members in the German-speaking region,” it said.

PEN Berlin was founded in 2022 after a scandal at the general meeting of the PEN Center Germany. At that time the writers’ association split. A number of authors, including Yücel, Menasse, Daniel Kehlmann and Wladimir Kaminer, founded PEN Berlin. After his re-election, Yücel called PEN Berlin a human rights organization that supports persecuted authors and advocates freedom of expression and diversity of opinion. “This work now needs to be placed on a solid foundation,” he emphasized. (epd)