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Francois Bizot: Confronting the Worst: Writing and Catastrophe
In 1971, I was caught by a revolutionary communist in Cambodia. I was chained and condemned to death and before that, interrogated by a young man who asked me… More
Elena Poniatowska: Confronting the Worst: Writing and Catastrophe
I’m going to read a testimony from a person who helped during the 1985 earthquake in Mexico. It’s a young boy, about eighteen:We reached the baseball park in the… More
Crossover Artists: Writing in Another Language
SHAN SA: I apologize, first of all, for my accent. It’s a really horrible, Chinese-French accent because I’m Chinese and I’m living in Paris now and I’m writing in… More
How Should One Read a Book?
In the first place, I want to emphasize the note of interrogation at the end of my title. Even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer… More
The Most Insidious Censorship: A Conversation
K. ANTHONY APPIAH: As member’s of PEN’s Freedom-to-Write Committee, we’re heirs to a tradition of worrying mostly about the role of governments in restricting access to information, which is… More
Flattop for Cherry Hill
This is a story about the experiences I have had as a prison barber. I was incarcerated at the C.E. Egeler Correctional Facility in Jackson, Michigan 1995-1998.Cherry Hill is… More
Yahoo Settles Civil Lawsuit with Families of Chinese Cyber-dissidents
PEN American Center today welcomed the news that Yahoo has settled a lawsuit brought by families of Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning, two Chinese cyber-dissidents who were jailed for… More
Day of the Imprisoned Writer
In any given year, International PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC) monitors around 1,000 attacks against writers, journalists, poets, publishers and editors worldwide. These range from persistent harassment and… More
Barrio Sin Luz
¿Se va la poesía de las cosas o no la puede condensar mi vida? Ayer—mirando el último crepúsculo— yo era un manchón de musgo entre unas ruinas. More
Love and Revolution
People sometimes talk about Neruda as two different poets: the poet of politics and revolution, and the poet of love or romance. He is actually both at the same… More
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