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Theme: #3 2011

Editorial

Editorial

How could we understand what is actually “taking place?”

Text: Ola Larsmo December 14 2011
Poetry

The ICORN-relay—Sepideh Jodeyri

The ICORN-relay has now left Scandinavia and landed in Italy, where the Iranian poet, translator and journalist Sepideh Jodeyri currently lives. Jodeyri has written three collections of poetry; two...

Text: Sepideh Jodeyri December 14 2011
Article

Children to dissidents in Russia

What happens to the children of dissidents? To tell an unwelcome truth or to protest against oppression takes a lot of personal courage. But only too often the authorities tries to silence dissidents...

Text: Oksana Chelysheva December 14 2011
Fiction

Forbidden poetry in Vietnam

“Vietnamese poetry is created through the left cerebral hemisphere; it knows what it is doing”, writes the author and literary critic Kristoffer Leandoer about the state of Vietnamese poetry today...

Text: Kristoffer Leandoer Translation from Swedish: Caroline Åberg December 14 2011
Article

Statelessness in Kuwait

Being stateless means that you do not have any civil rights such as personal documents, education, employment, or access to medical care. In Kuwait there are currently around 100 000 stateless people...

Text: Mona Kareem December 14 2011
Fiction

Citizens in need of a homeland

Far away from media attention there are people stuck in oppression, who never will be known or mentioned. This text is written by a Saudi writer under pseudonym and tells about ethnic and bureaucratic...

Text: Waleed Hamadani December 14 2011
Article

Requiem for pigs

The Egyptian revolution showed us how people with very different backgrounds could work together for one cause: to fight a totalitarian regime. But who were they? And how can the conflict between the...

Text: Fawzia Assaad December 14 2011
Fiction

IN MEMORIAM TATÁRSZENTGYÖRGY, 2009

On 23 February 2009 a Roma man and his 5-year-old son were shot and their house burnt down, seriously injuring the other two of the children and their mother, in Tatárszentgyörgy, some sixty...

Text: Péter Kántor December 14 2011
Article

Hungarian Democracy in Tatters

The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his party Fidesz controls over two-thirds of the parliamentary seats. Now they are putting the country through a thorough makeover. The Canadian-Hungarian...

Text: Éva S. Balogh December 13 2011
Article

Fear and Self-Censorship

In 2010, the Hungarian parliament voted for a new media law that gives great powers to a new Media Authority to impose fines and revoke licences, with no possibility of appeal. There have also been...

Text: Eszter Babarczy December 13 2011

Theme: #2 2011

Editorial

EDITORIAL

“Prison literature is a dynamic genre of our time”

Text: Ola Larsmo September 23 2011
Fiction

Behind The Rise of the Great Powers

The present copyright holders to Mr Liu Xiaobo's work, Harvard University Press, has not granted us the right to publish his essay Behind The Rise of the Great Powers. Therefore this text is not...

September 26 2011
Poetry

Nights and days

On September 23 ten years had passed since the Swedish journalist Dawit Isaak and his colleagues at the Eritrean newspaper Seitit was imprisoned by the Afwerki regime. Today he is being held at the...

Text: Lars Mikael Raattamaa September 23 2011
Poetry

To Dawit Isaak

Dawit Isaak was imprisoned in Eritrea on September 23, 2001. After 18 years, he’s still being held behind bars in one of the world's most uncompromising dictatorships, without being the subject of any...

Text: Ida Börjel September 23 2011
Fiction

I will steal into the murderers’ sleep

Samar Yazbek, born 1970, is a Syrian writer and journalist who has criticized the Syrian regime before and during the uprising. This text is part of a series in the form of a diary she wrote during...

Text: Samar Yazbek September 23 2011
Fiction

Letter from a cell

The Kurdish author, lawyer and human rights activist Muharrem Erbey was jailed in December 2009 and has since then been hidden and placed in the notorious prison of Diyarbakir. He is among other...

Text: Muharrem Erbey September 22 2011
Fiction

The ICORN-RELAY – Philo ikonya

In the last issue of PEN/Opp we started the “ICORN-relay”, where writers who has received refuge in ICORN cities tell us about their own background and the state of free speech in their home countries...

Text: Philo Ikonya September 22 2011

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