The PEN Ten with Trish Salah
"Censorship is inevitable, part of psychic life and engaging with other people. The censorship of political speech is deplorable and to be resisted, but also is often not recognized… More
The PEN Ten with Saleem Haddad
"When I write in English, I try to make sure that my writing holds a mirror up to the West as much as it does to the Arab world.… More
The PEN Ten with Hayan Charara
"When it comes to the censorship of Arab or Muslim lives, the 'unacceptable parts' are usually not of books or movies but of entire realities." More
The PEN Ten with Philip Metres
"I think we Americans have to flip the question and ask, in what ways are we ourselves in a condition of carceral submission, surveilled and made docile? How much… More
The PEN Ten with Moustafa Bayoumi
"A writer’s “revolutionary duty,” as Gabriel García Márquez once put it, is 'to write well.' The responsibility of a human being, on the other hand, is to practice compassion… More
The PEN Ten with Dunya Mikhail
"When I came to America, I found that censorship had no home on the ground, but it was somehow in the air, implicit. Speech here is usually restricted to… More
The PEN Ten with Khaled Mattawa
"Being uninhibited is not the only imaginative state that artists should seek to be all the time." More
The PEN Ten with Elif Batuman
"I think literature has a collective purpose, which is to process the reality of lived experience, in much the same way that dreams process the reality of waking life." More
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