Some 100 writers, including Pulitzer Prize-winning Alice Walker, Richard Ford, and Junot Diaz, are urging the PEN American Center to deny any support from Israel as it denies “basic rights to the Palestinian people.”

The writers sent an impassioned letter to PEN America in March, but only now has it been published. PEN American Center, created in 1922, is a group aiming to promote literature and support literary fellowship.

PEN American Center, which describes itself as “the US branch of the world’s leading international literary and human rights organisation,” has chosen to align, once again, with the government of Israel, one of the world’s most persistent abusers of human rights. It has accepted funding for the annual World Voices Festival from the Israeli embassy as part of the Brand Israel programme, a government pubic relations initiative launched in 2005 that uses cultural productions to distract from Israel’s well-documented and systematic destruction of Palestinian life.

More than 100 writers, including Pulitzer Prize winners Junot Díaz and Alice Walker, have called on the PEN American Center to reject sponsorship from the Israeli Embassy for PEN’s upcoming week-long World Voices Festival in New York City. The call is part of the cultural boycott campaign against Israel, part of the global boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

More than 100 writers have signed a letter to PEN American Centre urging it to reject support from the Israeli government.

The writers include Alice Walker, author of The Colour Purple, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Junot Diaz, and Native American writer Louise Erdrich. Poet Eileen Myles, writer Russell Banks and activist Angela Davis also signed the letter.