THE PHLIPPINE Center of the International PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Novelists), with The Varsitarian, the official student paper of the University of Santo Tomas, will hold the Philippine PEN Forum on Jose Rizal on June 25, 1:30 p.m., at the UST Thomas Aquinas Research Complex auditorium.
Speakers will be critic and Manila Times literary editor Elmer Ordoñez, and National Artists for Literature F. Sionil Jose and Bienvenido Lumbera, founder and current chair, respectively, of the Philippine PEN.
The forum is being held in connection with the 150th birth anniversary on June 19, 2011 of Rizal, a UST alumnus.
Jose and Lumbera themselves are alumni of UST, where they took up Journalism at the old UST Faculty of Philosophy and Letters aside from being editors of the Varsitarian.
The PEN is the international federation of writers promoting freedom of expression. Its international headquarters is in London and its current president is Canadian essayist-philosopher John Ralston Saul. A former president is Peruvian-Spanish novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Nobel prizewinner for literature who visited Manila and attended the Philippine PEN Congress in the late 1970’s.
The forum is open to the public. Call 5255038 (Solidaridad Bookstore) or 4061511 loc. 8235 (Varsitarian).
