The Irish PEN/PEn na hÉireann Freedom to Write event has become a popular fixture at the John Hewitt International Summer School (Armagh). This year was no exception. The 120-seat theatre was booked out, with a waiting list (tickets were free thanks to a generous grant from Dublin Unesco City of Literature). Caoilfhionn Gallagher spoke eloquently about the increasingly systematic suppression of press freedom around the world. Our Empty Chair featured journalist, editor and digital media CEO Mzia Amalglobeli from Georgia. Mzia has been held in detention since January 2025 on spurious charges. Her complaints of ill-treatment have yet to be investigated. Her story is so compelling that 84 members of the audience were moved to write postcards of support in a heart-warming gesture of international support and solidarity. FULL REPORT TO FOLLOW IN OUR NEXT NEWSLETTER.
With huge thanks to the Dublin Unesco City of Literature office for sponsoring this event, to the John Hewitt Society and the Marketplace Theatre, Armagh for hosting us.
The PEN Centres of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland are deeply alarmed by the rise in violence against migrant and other marginalised communities on these islands, driven by mis- and dis-information. This is part of a wider rise of those who seek to undo our hard-won civic rights using methods which directly contravene the PEN Charter. In accordance with the charter we call on all members to “’do their utmost to dispel all hatreds”’ and to “’oppose such evils of a free press as mendacious publication, deliberate falsehood and distortion of facts for political and personal ends”’. We are in solidarity with those targeted and with all who are affected by such violence.
The Narges Foundation has been informed that Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi was urgently transferred to a hospital in Zanjan on Friday, May 1, following a “catastrophic deterioration” of her health, which the foundation said included two episodes of complete loss of consciousness and a severe cardiac crisis.
Read full statement on Narges Mohammadi foundation here.
From BBC article: “Relatives of jailed Iranian human rights campaigner Narges Mohammadi and the Nobel Peace Prize Committee have called for her to be transferred to adequate medical facilities following a sharp reported deterioration of her health.
Her family said the 54-year-old had been taken from her prison in north-west Iran to a local hospital, calling the move a “last-minute” action that may come too late.”
Irish PEN/PEN na hEireann express concern for our fellow writers who have been detained in recent times in Iran. In particular, Narges Mohammadi, on whose behalf we have been campaigning for a number of years.
The following international petition has been signed by Irish PEN/PEN na hEireann.
Iran: Over 30 NGOs raise alarm over dire situation for detained human rights defenders amid rising protest death toll
IRAN’S DETAINEES AT HIGH RISK AMIDST A COMMUNICATIONS BLACKOUT
Urgent Protection Required for Human Rights Defenders, Journalists, and Other Individuals Jailed for their Writing, Expression, or Assembly, Amid Nationwide Protests and Internet Shutdown
14 January 2026
As mass repression of protests and dissent dramatically intensifies in Iran amidst an almost complete communications shutdown, the Free Narges Coalition and more than 30 undersigned organisations call for urgent and concrete actions to circumvent internet censorship, as well as raising alarm regarding the grave threats to existing and newly-arrested detainees, particularly those jailed for their human rights work, journalism, expression, activism, or peaceful assembly. Iran is facing one of the most severe periods of repression in its recent history. Protests that began in Tehran’s Grand Bazar on December 28 against the collapse of the national currency grew in size and scope until authorities completely turned off Iran’s internet access to the outside world and began a more severe crackdown on January 8. Shocking images of dead protesters, doctors’ reports of overflowing hospitals and the lethal use of military-grade weapons and live ammunition, and the absence of access for journalists and independent media, have led to desperation of families missing loved ones, as well as grave concerns around the safety of thousands of those injured or detained. Human rights organisations and international media have been able to verify the killing of over 2,500 protesters, including children under the age of 18, and thousands injured, some severely while almost twenty thousand confirmed arrested. With the majority of the killings occurring since 8 January, amid a full-blown digital blackout that has made further verification impossible, current reports estimate the number of killings to be much higher, likely amounting to more than 6,000.
Meanwhile, in official statements, Tehran’s Prosecutor General has described protesters as vandals and threatened they will face moharebe (waging war against God), a charge that is punishable by death under Islamic Penal law. State media have also reported mass arrests of individuals they label as “rioters.”
According to NetBlocks, Iran has now experienced more than 140 hours of near-total internet shutdown since January 8. Such communications blackouts severely restrict access to independent reporting and sharing of essential and life-saving information, and create conditions in which grave human rights violations can be committed with impunity. Prior to the shutdown, human rights defenders and known dissidents both inside and outside of Iran had reported receiving threats, as authorities have attempted to suppress expressions of support for the protests online.
In this context, both recent and long-standing detainees–including human rights defenders, journalists, writers, and artists–face an acute and often overlooked risk. Past patterns in Iran demonstrate that periods of widespread unrest are accompanied by heightened abuses inside detention facilities, where these groups are particularly vulnerable to extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance, torture, and other forms of ill-treatment. Those held in solitary confinement and denied contact with the outside world are at especially high risk.
Among those recently detained are prominent figures from Iran’s civil society, including Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Narges Mohammadi, Sepideh Gholian, Alieh Motalebzadeh, Javad Alikordi, Hasti Amiri, Pooran Nazemi, and other human rights defenders and journalists. They were violently arrested following the memorial ceremony for lawyer Khosrow Alikordi on 12 December in Mashhad, and have been held in solitary confinement, their whereabouts and condition unknown, for more than one month. Narges Mohammadi has been denied access to legal counsel and contact with her family, apart from a brief phone call on 14 December when she reported severe ill-treatment, including beatings to her head and neck with batons, as well as threats of further violence. On January 6, before the total internet shutdown, journalist and human rights defender Alieh Motalebzadeh, who has been diagnosed with cancer, was able to call her family. Her daughter reported in a video message that she did not sound well, stating that the detainees are under severe pressure. She was released on bail following deterioration of her health on 12 January. The health condition of Pouran Nazemi is reported to be dire while she remains detained. Narges Mohammadi has been hospitalized for three days after her violent arrest and arbitrary detention since 12 December. Due to the ongoing communications blackout, the families and lawyers have not been able to be in contact with them, including to inquire if their 30 day arbitrary detention order has been extended or not.
We, the undersigned organisations, express our deep concern over the escalation of the killing of protesters, as well as the serious risk of arbitrary legal charges, punishable by the death penalty, against those detained. We stress that the lives and safety of those more vulnerable under detention in Iran must not be forgotten. Human rights defenders, journalists, writers, artists, and those prosecuted due their exercise of freedom of assembly and expression are at the forefront of the peaceful struggle for fundamental human rights. They must be protected and immediately and unconditionally released, and we call for immediate actions from the international community to halt the escalating violations of human rights and humanity. As reports of mass arrests, killings, and widespread violence continue to escalate, we stand in full solidarity with the people of Iran in their legitimate struggle for fundamental freedoms and democratic rights. We urge the international community to take urgent and concrete actions to prevent further loss of life and to ensure that Iran uphold its international human rights obligations, including through:
Immediate and unconditional release of all those jailed in Iran for their peaceful activism or expression, including Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Narges Mohammadi, as well as human rights and women’s rights defenders, civil society activists, journalists, lawyers, writers, artists, representatives of religious and ethnic minorities, environmental and labour defenders, students, and all others detained or at risk for exercising their fundamental rights. Immediate restoration of full and unrestricted access to internet and telecommunications services, and an end to nationwide information blackouts that censor news reporting, facilitate repression, block the transmission of essential and life-saving communications including for medical personnel, and impede documentation of human rights violations.Independent, impartial, and transparent investigations into killings, torture, lethal use of force by security agents, enforced disappearances, and other serious human rights violations committed in the context of the ongoing protests, with a view to ensuring accountability in line with international law.
As every hour of inaction increases the risk of irreversible loss of human life and gross violations of human rights. The international community must act urgently to protect the detainees, ensure their safety and rights, and prevent further violations under international law.
Signatures: Narges Foundation Front Line Defenders PEN America Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
All Human Rights for All in Iran Alliance des femmes pour la démocratie ARC – Artists at Risk Connection ARTICLE 19 Artists at Risk (AR) Association for Human Rights of Azerbaijanis in Iran (ArcDH) Baloch activists campaign Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) Coalition For Women In Journalism Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) ECPM (Together against the death penalty) End Gender Apartheid International Campaign European Uyghur Institute Fondation des Femmes Haalvsh Human Rights Organization (Haalvsh) HÁWAR.help International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) Iran House (NGO) Iran Justice Irish PEN/PEN na hEireann Kurdistan Human Rights Association-Geneva (KMMK-G) Kurdpa Human Rights Organization League for the Defence of Human Rights in Iran (LDDHI) Middle East Matters Neda d’Iran Nobel Women’s Initiative (NWI) PEN Austria PEN Canada PEN Denmark PEN Flanders PEN International PEN Melbourne PEN Netherlands PEN Norway PEN Sweden Stop honor killings Strategic Litigation Project, Atlantic Council United for Iran World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT)
Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann is gravely concerned about the detention of writer Naoise Dolan, one of several Irish citizens taking part in the Thousand Madleens flotilla. The flotilla was illegally intercepted last night and seized by armed Israeli forces in international waters.
The Irish Government and the Department of Foreign Affairs urgently need to act to ensure that Irish participants are not mistreated while in Israeli detention.
The flotilla seeks only to break the siege, deliver aid and to highlight the ongoing genocide in Gaza. These illegal acts against a non-violent civilian vessel carrying humanitarian aid and unarmed activists are unacceptable under international law.
Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann expresses its support for these aims. We call on the Irish government and the Irish embassy in Israel to protect Irish writer Naoise Dolan and all the Irish citizens that are illegally detained by Israel.
We reiterate our call for the protection of the lives and human rights of writers, journalists, and all innocent people affected by the ongoing genocide in Palestine.
And we again call for an unimpeded access to urgently needed humanitarian aid and the release of all the hostages.
Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann Pádraig Hanratty and Liz McManus (Co-Chairs)
I speak to you today as a woman, a Ukrainian, a member of PEN’s WWC Advisory Board, and a witness to the transformative power of words in times of war and occupation. I come from a land whose coasts are celebrated this week at the PORT Literary Festival in Odesa, focused on “Uzberezhzhya svobody”—the Shores of Freedom. This inaugural PORT festival, taking place on the last days of August, is establishing itself as a new cultural platform in southern Ukraine, with literary and musical performances, poetry workshops, and presentations by renowned authors such as Shevchenko Prize laureates and leading voices from PEN Ukraine.
Yes, another literary festival in times of war. Ukraine continues to host such events despite unrelenting attacks and growing threats to safety: organizing a festival now demands rigorous risk assessments, searching for venues with operational bomb shelters, and implementing strict security measures including “face control” at entrances. Odesa’s literary gathering is part of a wider wave of resilience—just weeks earlier, Ukraine’s leading Book Arsenal Festival in Kyiv welcomed over 35,000 visitors even as the city endured missile strikes and the destruction of cultural sites, reminding us all what is at stake.
Here we are, writing and gathering in the midst of destruction, refusing to surrender the Shores of Freedom—on both the page and the map.
Let me put it simply: for Ukrainians, our shores are not just places on a map, or symbols of our culture and how we start again. They are also places where outsiders have tried to take over, to silence us, and to wipe out everything Ukrainian—year after year. Nevertheless, there is something inside us that always pulls us back toward freedom and a true sense of who we are. No matter how hard others have tried to put out our light, the sparks of Ukrainian culture keep shining, bright and unstoppable.
This year, I will not show you any photographs. I will only say that Vika—our Vika Amelina, whom many of you may remember from the congress in India and later—was awarded the Orwell Prize for her book “Looking at Women Looking at War”. Great documentary writing and documentation of the war. Posthumously. Her husband, who is dedicating the prize funds to support the New York Literary Festival, launched by Viktoria herself, accepted the award. Her book collects witness accounts from Ukrainian women documenting Russian war crimes. It is not just a record of female voices; it is a deeply layered document of our ongoing reality, skillfully connecting today’s genocide with the historical terrors of the past. As her work evolved, it wove together diaries, interviews, field reports, excerpts from books and media—each fragment a testimony that makes us present for those who can no longer speak for themselves.
William Collins published the book in 2025, with a foreword written by Margaret Atwood. It is an unfinished collection of reports about Ukrainian women who document Russian war crimes. This collection contains the stories of witnesses who have endured the most terrible horrors of Russian aggression and occupation. At the same time, the book offers a convincing explanation of why Russia’s war against Ukraine actually began long before 2014, and why it’s so important for the world to remember the Russian terror against Ukrainians in the 1930s and 1960s.
This year at Oscar, the new film of Mstyslav Chernov “2000 Meters from Andriivka” represents us—most of the heroes in this film truly are heroes. Posthumously.
In the eleventh year of the war, there are now so many of our dead—if not in every family, then just one handshake away. Mars field in Lviv is filled with bodies and memories – there my university friends, ex colleagues, close friends, guys I was in love ones.
Speaking here, I catch myself censoring my own pain—a reflex many Ukrainians have mastered, especially when abroad, surrounded by others carrying invisible burdens. As of 2025, more than 3.8 million Ukrainians remain internally displaced, while some 9.4 million—nearly one in five citizens—have been uprooted by war, many without a permanent home for over three years. I empathize deeply with them. Time continues; perhaps only with distance will true understanding become possible. One person may have lost their home, while another’s family remains in a city under occupation—these stories are all around me. I work closely with women and girls living under Russia’s occupation, and their daily reality renders my own private anxieties almost unspeakable, so vast is the gulf. While someone grieves for relatives left behind yet still alive, others are waiting for word of loved ones in captivity; still others only know that their sons or daughters are missing, with hope flickering painfully between absence and return.
As my friend, Olesya Khromeychuk wrote: we think of a grave as a luxury, when so many have vanished without a trace. For every trauma, this war reveals a deeper wound. For every ache, there is a pain more profound still.
For every cry, there is silence. Ukrainians have been forced for years to remain silent about the dead—as if erasing names could erase loss. Today, nearly 50,000 people remain missing as a direct result of Russia’s invasion, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, their fate unknown to both families and official records. Now, we must unlearn this enforced silence and find the courage to speak about our dead as if they were still present—because their memory is a form of resistance, and their stories belong to us all. Now we must learn to speak about our dead as if they are still alive. That is uncomfortable talk, isn’t it? However, silence should be considered wrong. Now it is our duty to speak and tell their stories.
This is why PEN Ukraine remains relentless in its mission. Just two months ago, our Kyiv warehouse, where more than 11,000 books were stored, was damaged by a Russian missile strike. Despite this, our “Unbreakable Libraries” initiative continues undeterred, delivering thousands of English and bilingual books to frontline and war-affected libraries. Since 2022, in partnership with PEN International, English PEN, Book Aid International, and major British publishers, we have distributed over 45,000 books to libraries across 17 Ukrainian regions, including those in liberated and high-risk areas.
Through the “People of Culture Claimed by War” project, we honour the almost 200 artists, writers, and cultural figures lost since February 2022, creating a living digital archive of Ukrainian talent whose lives were cut short by invasion.
Our “Lysty do Vilnoho Krymu” (“Letters to Free Crimea”) campaign connects the global community with Ukrainian political prisoners held in Russian-occupied Crimea, while programs like “Prospisi” workshops, “Merezhivo” public readings, and regional PEN meetings nurture new literary voices and strengthen international solidarity among writers and activists.
Much of our work is dedicated to supporting journalists in Russian captivity—amplifying their stories, offering moral mentorship, and keeping public attention alive. In these conditions, mentorship is no mere symbol: it is a living bridge, connecting those silenced and isolated by war to a world that refuses to forget them.
What is the special role of women in all of it?
Women are at the heart of everything I have just described. Ukrainian women are not just witnesses; they are warriors—my friend Eva is great port but also a soldier; they are documentarians, truth-tellers, advocates, and the tireless voice behind so many efforts. From frontline librarians risking their safety to deliver books, to the writers facing immense loss and recording testimonies, to volunteers collecting letters for prisoners—these are women who refuse to let our stories disappear. They are the ones listening compassionately to the pain of others, translating silence into words, and shaping how the world remembers this war.
In truth, the very act of documenting, advocating, and caring—the core work of PEN, the work of writers—is powered by women’s empathy and determination. Ukrainian women are keeping the current of our culture alive. Their voices are irreplaceable. In the spirit of this Congress, and of our shared commitment to “Words of the Free,” let us listen to them, and let us not allow their work or their experience to slip into silence.
Let us honour, protect, and amplify the voices of women writers, journalists, and cultural workers, in Ukraine and everywhere war tries to erase memory. Let us help turn their pain and stories into words that move the world to action, solidarity, and hope.
Storytelling resurrects; it makes the absent present. It blurs the boundary between the living, the dead, and the unborn—provided the listener is attentive and the storyteller is a true master, but most of all, when the story is retold with love. Our pain is censored by comparison, ranked and calibrated. But here is the place for literature. As one of our Ukrainian writers Anton Sanchenko said: culture is humanity’s backup. Literature is irreplaceable now. Every act of speaking out, collecting stories, and refusing silence repairs the breach.
Today, I ask one thing of you. I ask you to apply your writers’ magic: to turn silence into words.
Speak for us and about us. Translate the silence into words, as only writers can. This is our fight against the “syndrome of banality”, against becoming indifferent to each other’ suffering.
Raise your voices for our imprisoned journalists and cultural figures—your attention, your mentor letters, and your advocacy save lives and preserve hope.
Support our libraries and festivals. Nominate and amplify Ukrainian voices. Remember those lost, and challenge the world to reckon with the crimes against Ukrainian culture.
Don’t allow those stories to be erased. Insist on precise, truthful fact-finding. Teach empathy, reject cynicism, and let your words strike with the current of a strong story.
The theme of PEN Ukraine for 2025 is “Being in the World.” To be in the world is to fight for our place, our voices, and the right to be heard and to be told about.
Thank you for your attention, your solidarity, and for making words powerful enough to keep us present—both for ourselves, and for those who can no longer speak.
17 freedom of expression and human rights organisations have written to Prime Minister Keir Starmer to jointly call for the UK to intensify efforts to secure British-Egyptian writer Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s release.
Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann has joint the appeal for Alaa Abd el-Fattah to call the UK to intensify efforts to secure British-Egyptian writer Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s release.
Rt Hon Sir Keir Starmer MP 10 Downing Street London United Kingdom SW1A 2AB
14 March 2025
Dear Prime Minister,
We, the undersigned 17 freedom of expression and human rights organisations, are writing to welcome your work to secure the release of imprisoned British-Egyptian writer Alaa Abd el-Fattah and to urge you to continue to intensify these efforts.
We welcome your attention to Alaa’s case – in particular your call to President Sisi on 28 February in which you pressed for Alaa’s release. As you know, this level of engagement has allowed his mother Laila Soueif to have ‘hope that Alaa’s case might move’ and to move to a partial hunger strike of 300 calories a day.
We trust that you will stand by your statement in parliament on 26 February where you made a guarantee to Alaa’s mother that you would do all that you can to secure his release.
The need to resolve this case and secure Alaa’s release remains urgent. Laila has stated that ‘without fast movement on Alaa’s case’ she will resume a total hunger strike. Meanwhile, on learning that his mother had been hospitalised, Alaa himself began a hunger strike on 1 March.
The holy month of Ramadan offers an opportunity for clemency from the Egyptian government. Last week, 50 Nobel Prize winners, writers, and international organisations wrote to President Sisi asking him to issue a Presidential pardon for Alaa and to ‘signal a commitment to justice and compassion’.
In your last call with President Sisi, you agreed to speak again soon. We sincerely request that this happens as soon as possible in the hope that it can finally unlock Alaa’s release in the coming weeks.
Prime Minister, your recent engagement on this case has created an opportunity to see Alaa reunited with his son in Brighton. We urge you to use this chance to do all you can to ensure his long-overdue release.
Yours sincerely,
Alejandro Mayoral Baños, Executive Director, Access Now
Sacha Deshmukh, Chief Executive, Amnesty International UK
Quinn McKew, Executive Director, ARTICLE 19
Chris Doyle, Director, Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU)
Jodie Ginsberg, Chief Executive Officer, Committee to Protect Journalists
Jillian C. York, Director for International Freedom of Expression, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Daniel Gorman, Director, English PEN
James Lynch, Co-Director, FairSquare
Yasmine Ahmed, UK Director, Human Rights Watch
Baroness Helena Kennedy LT KC, Director, International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI)
Liz McManus, Chairperson, Irish PEN / PEN na hÉireann
Jim Killock, Executive Director, Open Rights Group
Liesl Gerntholtz, Managing Director, PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Center, PEN America
Grace Westcott, President, PEN Canada
Romana Cacchioli, Executive Director, PEN International
Fiona O’Brien, UK Director, Reporters Without Borders
Has there ever been a time when the world was at peace and PEN had nothing to do? Has there ever been a day in which there were no wars, no dictators, no writers in prison or having to flee into exile, a moment when PEN can put its feet up and contemplate a world without conflict? If anything the challenges that PEN has to deal with seem to be spiralling out of control.
The PEN charter is one of the great documents of the twentieth century. It is not only a founder document to a century of turbulence and unprecedented violence, it is also the template for all other documents that attempted to capture, in one place, the hope of contending with the chaos of the times. It was a charter of writers and poets and essayists. And it was far seeing in its vision and far reaching in its effects. It launched an extraordinary movement that has been able to make modest but important interventions in a world dominated by the motions of force and the realities of power. Is it proof that the pen is mightier than the sword? No. For the document did not stop wars and it did not always save writers. It did not turn back the tide of evil. But it showed one thing. It showed that the pen is as persistent as the sword. It showed that the pen can be more persuasive than the sword. It also showed that the pen can outlive the sword.
To measure the power of the pen and the power of the sword on one plane is an illogical act that can only lead to artistic despair. And despair is no choice for writers in a world that is fatally riven by factions and war.
Writers in a time of war ought to be alert and aware. For war is the suspension of the ethos of humanity. War is when the law of disorder, the law of brutality, reigns. In the name of the many reasons nations have for waging war the values of civilisation are set aside. But a time of war is when the writer finds it most necessary to hold on to those values and to hold nations to those values as well. For not only does civilisation perish in war, the civilising instinct becomes brutalised and people are made to accept all manner of barbarities as the norm. As writers we can never accept barbarities as the norm. War promotes moral cannibalism, where leaders make the devouring of their fellow human beings the only condition of their survival. Writers in a time of war become the ferocious protectors of a lost sanity. They become the moral custodians. They hold up a mirror to the monsters into which the age is turning the ordinary citizen, for the leaders first have to turn the citizens into monsters that accept an atrocious version of humanity before they themselves can plunge their nations into an orgy of blood and death.
This is not true of all wars. For there are wars of aggression, wars of conquest, and there are righteous wars. That is to say there are wars one must fight to prevent oneself from being enslaved, and there are wars fought to free ourselves from the intolerable yoke of oppression. The wars I am talking about are the unrighteous, conquest-driven, oppression-bringing variety.
The writer must become more fearless in a time of war but also more strategic. We have to find cunning ways to reflect the monstrosities of the times without becoming consumed by them. We must avoid becoming monsters ourselves. We must heed Nietzsche’s warning about the abyss that you peer into also peering back into you.
Therefore no one can say how a writer should best respond to the times. Some might opt to offer the benediction of calm and sanity, eschewing rage for the simpler qualities that help people to remember their humanity and to remind them of better times that will inevitably come. Others might choose to expose the viciousness of the times directly and uncompromisingly. Others might choose satire. Some might opt for the diaristic, to describe what happened day to day so that the people won’t forget.
But one thing writers can’t choose is to allow themselves to be defeated by the age. Writers become heroes by maintaining the sanity with which to dream. By maintaining the clarity with which to write well. Writers often become their own best artists in the very centre of the storm. No one has the right to ask this of writers, but it is what they must do.
The truth is that we are all raised by the quality of our ideals. And the ideals of PEN, concentrated in our charter, are a raft with which we can sail over turbulent seas. They are an armour in violent times. They are a panacea in times of madness. For they enshrine our best values and they remind us what civilisation means and why it is worth protecting when power structures torch its very foundations. To writers everywhere the charter is a lighthouse and a beacon of hope and solidarity.
Writers appear to operate alone, but they have to maintain a mental and spiritual sense of community else they write into a void. The writer’s condition is a paradoxical one: both in solitude and in community, both alone and yet writing for, dreaming for, unsuspected millions.
For the writer is the antidote to the dreams and distortions of power. The writer is set again the anti-human instincts of power which must create deserts in order to plant the grim city of their unbridled and uncontested reality.
The writer is the town crier whose bell warns the people that their houses are being destroyed from within
The writer is the truth teller possessed by the angel of conscience or the demon of rage
The writer brings dreams to the people whose sleep has been poisoned.
The writer is the child who reminds the people of the beauty of the slug, the magic of the millipede, and the poetry of a leaf of grass.
But sometimes in our need to save writers, to protect them, we forget that day by day the world is perishing and that there will be no world to write about if the world is dead.
It is time that PEN added the climate crisis to its charter. For the most primal thing that writers do is to reflect the world of nature. We can’t defend the writer if we ignore nature. What is there to gain if we save ourselves but lose our world? Writers who are persecuted for drawing attention to the devastation we are wrecking on nature are in special need of protecting. But the ethos of protecting our environment should now become a central part of PEN’s remit, otherwise we will be failing in the most solemn responsibility to be the defenders of the earth on which our destinies as a species rests.
The tree that gives us our paper, the dyes that give us our ink, the sky that contributes to our horizon, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, all are aspects of our survival and sanity. You don’t need me to spout out depressing facts to remind you that humanity is in possibly the last chapter of its fate if we do not solve the climate crisis in the next twenty or thirty years.
But our role does not have to be doom-laden. We can draw attention to what we are doing to the earth by celebrating the majesty of nature. We can offer alternative visions of the future. We can wail about what is being wrought on our oceans, the destruction of fishes. But one thing we cannot do anymore is be indifferent. This is not a problem for other people to solve. We cannot sit by and watch the world perish while we only save writers from the clutches of war or the deep prison of yet another dictator terrified of truth. We have to find a way to do both.
Fortunately we do not regard the exalted PEN charter as a tablet of law brought from the mountaintop. It is a document written by men and women who are alive to the challenges of their times. It is an adaptable document that expands or can contract as the time requires and as our awareness allows.
For me PEN is fundamentally an organisation of great hope not only in the power of the pen, but in the power of human beings to build and shape acceptable realities. A tremendous pragmatism underlies its foundations. It is a pragmatism rooted in the relationship between human beings and society, between vision and reality. The true pragmatists are those who know that the world is where our dreams must be realised in, and that society is the ultimate home of our vision for a happier world.
(Copyrights: Ben Okri. October, 2024. All Rights Reserved.)
Poems by Ben Okri
We Were Born In Difficult Times (For PEN)
We were born in difficult times We were made for tough times Over a 100 years ago they sensed That the world would be hard For those who work with truth, Who work with dreams, who work With justice. They sensed fire years To come. And they came, wars, gulags, Concentration camps, apartheid. They keep on coming, authoritarianism, Digital trolling, persecution, nuclear bombs, Alternative truths, climate change denial, Dictatorships, the slow strangulation Of democracy by lies, and by injustice. They sensed that power kills us first By suppressing the freedom of our speech. Writers are irrepressible workers with truth. They are a challenge to those who want to Silence freedom. They are a danger to Political bullies. They are a threat To those who need to control the nation’s Narrative to keep the people in their Place, in fear and dread. When abuse Of power gets out of hand, then writers Become the casualties. Writers are spies For justice, spies for truth, working With beauty and courage. That’s why We were made for tough times. As the times get tougher, So do we. Tougher in our art, In the truths we sing, and in our Movement, shining strong light In a darkening world where Screams are muffled
By power’s night. We ought always to be ready To wield forces of solidarity And the pen’s might.
The Road On Which We Walk
August light in darkened Cell, where one bold with words But cautious with living paces The narrow horizon of the brain. Outside, those she risked her Life for go on living the difficult Path of bread and of pain.
There are jails where writers Rot and turn into the deadness Of the walls. The only voices there Are the low lisps of the dead Who only have incarcerated ones For their timeless companionship. Writers in prison are a separate species. The world forgets them, to stay sane. Tyrants love the sound of muffled Writers. Self-censorship is their Favourite music. And when the people Are silent, when they obey, when Writers keep their heads down, Their pens still, tyrants sleep Especially well. Then the noise Of birds sailing between the trees Becomes the most prominent sound In the ghostly land. But leaves of grass Dream forgotten fictions And the flowers write poems In the wind, speaking of things That poets get jailed for.
Even the rivers, with Their winding prose, Sing the lost songs of rebellious fishes, While out there in Lands where truth has Become rare as epics, The children grow empty Spaces in their minds And the schools breed Terror in the simplest Things. Where writers Perish dreams of power Grow like wild weeds On the dying waters. That’s why the death Of writers impoverishes The dwindling earth.
But somewhere, those Who fight for the iron Freedom dream the charters That liberate the repressive Dawns, so that children may Re-write myths in their slow Progress through the sunlit Days and schools may Unleash the dark matter And the starlit energy Hidden in their veins. Our World is transformed By those who can redream It with light and radiant Intelligence. Then the wise poem That flowers might scribble, Or the prose that rivers Might weave, become The unknown future that’s Coiled in bright generations.
Our freedom makes A new future which can Save the earth, and Lift a new civilisation From the dreams of fishes And the golden sonnets Of birds. The road on which We walk was won for us By the charter-shapers And coders of humane ideals.
And here, under An autumnal sun, our Secret pages are lit With the fire of the heart’s Long-sighted destiny.
Susannah Dickey on the true crime media engine, Palestine, grief and the PEN Heaney Prize.
Susannah Dickey won the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize, awarded to a work of poetry of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships. The PEN Heaney Prize is a partnership between English PEN, Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and the Estate of Seamus Heaney. The 2024 Prize was supported by Hawthornden Foundation and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, and was announced on 2 December 2024 at Queen’s University Belfast, in partnership with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s.
‘Who Has the Right to Be Grieved’ is an essay that expands on Susannah Dickey’s speech on accepting the Prize.
In December 2024, I was incredibly fortunate to be awarded the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize. The prize, which recognises a collection of poetry with a focus on social engagement, was awarded to my debut collection, ISDAL, in which I attempted to satirise the typical tropes of True Crime podcasts, and ask questions about the broader implications of the True Crime media engine: what does the form ask of its listeners by rendering crimes – and, by necessary association, the victims of those crimes – as exceptional, aberrant, and fascinating? The aim of True Crime is not to engender grief among its audience, nor provide criticism of the systemic violence that leads to the death of so many of the genre’s subjects. Rather, the approach of True Crime is evidence of a dominant cultural pathology that trivialises death. And it was this that I wanted to try and understand.
When I was writing ISDAL, a book that hugely influenced my writing and thinking was Judith Butler’s Precarious Life. Butler asks what makes a life grievable – what qualifies a human being for the respect, acknowledgement and witness implicit within our willingness to grieve them? With ISDAL, the lives at the front of my mind were those of women murdered by practitioners of systemic misogyny. Violence against women continues to proliferate, particularly in the place I call home: rates of femicide in the north of Ireland since 2017 are the third highest per capita in Europe, and the highest per capita in the UK and Ireland.
In our current moment, though, any talk of systemic violence must include an acknowledgment of the people of Palestine and Lebanon. These are people who have also been deemed less than human, both by the Israeli state and by those governments that continue to equivocate, to cower, and to provide weapons to the Israeli army. At the time of writing my acceptance speech, the news of a ceasefire in Lebanon had just been announced; at the moment of writing this elaboration upon that speech, a ceasefire deal for Gaza has been agreed, coming into effect on Sunday 19 January. While the news of the Gaza ceasefire is welcome, just as the news of a ceasefire in Lebanon was, it is abundantly, blatantly not enough, because no ceasefire will ever be sufficient to right the wrongs perpetuated by Israel in Palestine since 1948. In fact, just hours after the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was announced, the Israeli military launched attacks across Gaza, adding to the Palestinian civilian death toll. If these actions tell us anything, it is that a ceasefire agreement does not, in the eyes of Israel and in the eyes of those who arm the Israeli war machine, imbue the citizens of Palestine with dignity, respect, or humanity; given which, this trajectory of dispossession can only continue.
In Precarious Life, Butler talks about the societal perception of violence perpetrated against those who have been strategically dehumanised in the service of military operations. ‘If violence is done against those who are unreal,’ Butler writes, ‘then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated.’ Over the course of the last 15 months, we have seen how the language of negation is used to deny Palestinians their reality – Palestinian children have been referred to as ‘people under 18’; Palestinian civilians have simply ‘died’, or been ‘killed’, often in an abstracted voice, with no specific reference to who, precisely, has been killing them. The goal of this language of negation is to absolve us of feeling – of feeling anything – and to discourage us from critiquing the canny self-mythologising of Britain, America and Israel, which works to make certain bodies, in this case Palestinian bodies, viable military targets.
Many of us are constituted in some way by the social susceptibility of our bodies to violence. While writing ISDAL, I wondered if women being the predominant audience for True Crime media might suggest a mass desire to escape the fact of our vulnerability – that playing the detective or voyeur for a while is a nice escape from the reality, which is that many of us have been, or will be, victims of male violence. While this desire for escape makes sense, what if there is a more meaningful way to face this frightening truth? If, by recognising the distinct but no less conspicuous vulnerabilities of those we are told are ‘other’ to us, we might foment the desire to protest the political frameworks that render so many of us undeserving of care? To grieve the ‘other’, therefore, might be a means by which we can challenge the membrane between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, to question which lives are presented as real, and which lives are presented as unreal.
A close friend of mine recently attended a funeral home in County Kerry, to participate in a practice in which residents of the parish, even those not closely associated with the deceased or their family, are encouraged to shake hands with the surviving loved ones, to share a moment of communion and condolence. My friend and I talked about how strange this seemed, in so many ways; having grown up in a large city in the north, it wasn’t a tradition either of us were familiar with. We talked about how querying the practice is an obvious consequence of the deliberate and incremental winnowing of public grieving, imposed by those systems and officials who shape our daily lives. Grief often demands that we step outside our typical itinerary; that we reflect upon the value of a life outside of what it can offer to industry, to production, to commerce, to economy. Grief, in many ways, functions in direct opposition to productivity, and it is therefore, in the most literal sense, not a ‘productive’ use of our time. Christina Sharpe writes about this in In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, acknowledging how, through grieving, we dislodge ourselves from the forward propulsion of the imperial present. It is exactly because of this that grief ought not to be reserved purely for those with whom we have shared moments.
I am obviously not so untethered from lived experience that I think it is possible to feel a similar intensity of loss for someone I have never met as it is for someone I love. Rather, what I mean is that grief ought not to be one fixed feeling, and that by casting the net of our grief wider – by permitting some variety in what we mean by the word – it is possible to see how grief can be a political act, a means by which we acknowledge a stranger’s humanity, their deservingness of care for the conditions of their lives, our outrage at the unbearable circumstances of their death. Because the circumstances of these deaths – Palestinian children, gunned down in the street by IDF soldiers; Palestinian families, murdered in their beds amid airstrikes – are indeed unbearable. That we, safe in our cosy privilege, can bear them is a symptom of many intersecting evils: information satiation, imperialist rhetoric, and racism. Mourning the Palestinian people, amid the pressure not to mourn them, is a resistant act. As Lisa Baraitser puts it in Enduring Time, ‘looking after the dead through the practice of grief’ can serve the larger interests of society, allowing us to ‘keep safe political ideas.’ Grieving can galvanise us, spur us on to advocate for those not afforded a voice.
In 2004, Seamus Heaney said in an interview, ‘I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.’ It felt – and feels – wrong, in so many ways, to celebrate a poetry prize in the midst of a genocide, but it is precisely this wrongness that we need to cling to, for the moment in which we fail to feel outrage at genocide is the moment in which there will be no reason for poetry to exist, because our collective conscience will be too rotted, too unfit for purpose, to allow in the kinds of change that are necessary for our salvation as a species. Butler writes: ‘I am as much constituted by those I grieve for as by those whose deaths I disavow, whose nameless and faceless deaths form the melancholic background for my social world.’ Over the course of this 15-month assault, over 45,000 Palestinians have been murdered in the background of our social worlds, each one worthy of our grief. This ceasefire should not bring an end to our outrage, because the ceasefire does not bring with it an end to the grief – a ceasefire does not rebuild the hospitals, homes, schools, and mosques destroyed in aerial bombardments, nor does it bring back those lost, the children, friends, fathers, mothers, and siblings. It is our collective responsibility to feel grief for these losses, because it is our grief that motivates intervention into the injustices facing those still with us.
In response to receiving the PEN Heaney Prize, I’d like to thank Seamus’ family for continuing to be so brilliant, and for continuing to do so much to support Irish poetry. I’d like to thank Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and English PEN for the work they do, including platforming writers like the brilliant Adania Shibli. I’d also like to thank the judges – Nick Laird, Paula Meehan, and Shazea Quraishi – for drawing attention to all the great books that were on the shortlist. And finally I’d like to finish by expressing my solidarity with and admiration for all those who continue to participate in acts of protest and witness. This ceasefire cannot signal the end of our efforts, or our attention. Free Palestine.
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Susannah Dickey is a writer from Derry. She is the author of two novels, Tennis Lessons (2020) and Common Decency (2022). Her debut collection of poetry, ISDAL, was published in 2023. It was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and won the PEN Heaney Prize 2024.
