PEN America champions the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. The bedrock work of the global PEN network is advocacy and assistance on behalf of individuals persecuted for their use of the written word or other forms of expression. PEN America’s Writers at Risk Database is a searchable catalog of the writers, journalists, academics, public intellectuals and others under threat around the world. The database includes historical cases PEN America has worked on from 1987 onwards; non-active cases are color-coded black. PEN America is grateful to the John Templeton Foundation for support that enabled the establishment of the Writers at Risk Database and to PEN International for their collaboration in assembling this database.
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Paing Ye Thu, a member of the Peacock Generation satirical poetry troupe specializing in the traditional art form of Thangyat, a type of slam poetry, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for mocking the military in a performance that was also streamed online. In a wave…
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Ugaz co-authored Mitad monjes, mitad soldados in 2015, an investigative nonfiction work alleging abuse in a Peruvian Catholic organization. In response to her announcing a second book on the topic, she faces online harassment, death threats, and several defamation suits of which she was aquitted in January 2022.
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In November 2022, Niang was arrested after a video was released on Dakar Matin in which he reported the contents of an internal gendarmerie report. He was released on bail on December 14, but detained on December 20 after speaking about the case publicly. He went on hunger strike until…
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Patiwat was arrested on October 19, 2020 on sedition charges for his prior involvement in Bangkok pro-democracy protests. After being arrested and released shortly thereafter several times in the following months, he was detained in February 2021 for violating lèse-majesté laws, sedition, and other lesser charges. In April 2021, he…
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Rusesabagina is the author of An Ordinary Man, an autobiography of his life as a hotel manager during the Rwandan genocide. He was detained in August 2020 when boarding a private flight en route to Dubai. In September 2021, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison on retaliatory terrorism-related…
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Pavel Horbach was detained after having performed his poetry at a neighbours’ gathering in Minsk on November 6, 2020 and sentenced to 15 days of administrative arrest.
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An internationally lauded journalist and opinion writer, Sheremet was killed in a car bomb explosion in Kyiv in April 2016. He was a longtime critic of Belarus President Aleksander Lukashenka, and investigations into his murder by Ukrainian authorities are ongoing.
Writers at Risk Database Key:
STATUS box that is red: Active case
STATUS box that is black: Inactive case
PEN America is deeply grateful to the John Templeton Foundation for its generous support of the Freedom to Write Index and Writers at Risk Database.
PEN America thanks the PEN International Secretariat and the Writers in Prison Committee for their extensive contributions to and collaboration on compiling the cases included in this database.