Carles Torner

Carles Torner is a Catalan poet and writer. He has published seven volumes of poetry, translations of his poetry have appeared in Six Catalan Poets (2013). He has also written essays in French, among them Shoah, a Pedagogy of Memory (2002) and The Indigenous Converted Me (2003), which was co-written with the late Bishop of Chiapas, Samuel Ruiz. Torner has participated in missions for imprisoned writers in Peru, Venezuela, Kazakhstan, and Turkey —trips that gave shape to a collection of 35 letters to foreign women writers or civil society leaders titled Babel’s Arch (2005). As chair of PEN’s Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee, he conceived and promoted the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights. He was PEN International Executive Director from 2014 to 2020 and is at present the director of the PEN Centenary.