When Ege Dündar was 19, his father was imprisoned. A journalist from Türkiye, his father Can Dündar faced two life sentences and the death penalty for a single article exposing government corruption. The trial flipped the family’s world on its head.
Eventually, Ege’s life became intertwined with PEN International, when he was invited to a coalition meeting of human rights organizations looking to create an action plan for his father. PEN Norway was the first center to invite Ege to campaign on his behalf. When Ege’s father couldn’t be there, the PEN network was.
Among the supporters was Ayi Renaud Dossavi, a Togolese writer, poet, and journalist. Renaud joined PEN Togo as its Secretary General in 2016, in large part because of the network it had for young people otherwise excluded from literary institutions. Ege and Renaud met at the 2022 PEN Congress—an annual meeting of the PEN International network—where they each presented on their respective centers’ youth work to attendees. Ege, by then working on staff at PEN International, felt the energy of the few young participants and the need for a space to be made specifically for them. Three years later, they’ve put the plan into action by creating the Young Writers Committee.
As PEN International’s first new standing committee created in 35 years, the Young Writers Committee aims to connect and support authors under 35 through mentorship, advocacy, collaborative projects, and storytelling spaces. Alongside the committee’s launch last month, was the creation of the Tomorrow Club platform by PEN Norway, a web publication featuring young storytellers across borders, including regional spotlights to personal essays. A core steering group of 10 representatives—including one from PEN America—is spearheading these efforts, with membership from 58 countries.
Prior to establishing the committee, Renaud was among the editors of La Sixième Décennie, an anthology published by PEN Togo that highlighted poetry from 2010-2020, Togo’s sixth decade of independence. “It was the time where the new information and communication technologies broke the old barriers for writing in our country…it was kind of a transition period,” said Renaud. “I knew the struggle young people had in that context.” In Togo, where publications are often self-financed, Renaud and his peers leveraged “that opportunity for younger people to be published even when they don’t have the resources,” amplifying young writers’ unique contributions to contemporary Togoloese literature. The anthology was among sources of inspiration for the Young Writers Committee.
Ege said in an interview that he was inspired by the way young people around the world were learning from each other’s experiences. “The more that people got acquainted with each other’s stories, often they were inspired by them, they were changed by them, and they became a window to complicated contexts,” Ege said. He noted how “young people refuse to be silenced” in student movements in Türkiye, Bangladesh, and the United States—the ways in which they “cut through the noise” of ideologies. “The world is looking increasingly more authoritarian in many respects and corrupt politicians are collaborating to crack down on dissent…we must mobilize with colleagues who feel like there is more to say, there is more to do to stand up for each other. We need to make space for this dynamism of the youth.”
In the PEN network, solidarity has come in many forms. Renaud spoke about an initiative in the PEN International Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee to make indigenous, endangered, and minority languages visible. The centralized nature of PEN International has allowed, “these kinds of global initiatives to coincide and connect with the local desires,” he said. “In French, we say glocal now—it’s a fusion of global and local. It’s a really strong vision of something going from local, going to the global, and then coming back.”
Ege’s father was held in custody for 92 days before he was released in February 2016 and went into exile. In 2020, Can Dündar was sentenced in absentia to 27 years and six months in prison. The appeal process is ongoing. Despite these circumstances, the Dündar family continues to find solace in the support of the PEN community, and Ege is now championing new pathways for solidarity.
As for the committee’s future, Ege looked to its past: “To pass on this hundred year old legacy of history—of many people that have suffered under many authoritarian regimes and catastrophes in humanity’s history—they stood by each other and helped each other resettle, find new lives, find new places to live in extremely dire circumstances. If we can pass on this network’s legacy to a younger generation, we may do the same.”
