Royal Society of Literature

The Royal Society of Literature (RSL) is a learned society and the "senior literary organisation in Britain". It was founded in 1820 by King George IV to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent".

The society's first president was Thomas Burgess, Bishop of St David's (who was later translated as Bishop of Salisbury). The society maintains its current level of about 450 Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature: generally 14 new fellows are elected annually, who are accorded the privilege of using the post-nominal letters FRSL.

Past fellows include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, J. R. R. Tolkien, W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Koestler, Chinua Achebe and P.J. Kavanagh. Present Fellows include Antonia Fraser, Athol Fugard, V. S. Naipaul, Peter Dickinson, Tom Stoppard, Helen Dunmore and J. K. Rowling. A newly created fellow inscribes their name on the society's official roll using either Byron's pen or T.S. Eliot's fountain pen, which replaced Dickens's quill in 2013.