Khet Mar (born 1969) is a novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist. As a twenty-two-year-old university student, she was arrested for her political activism, tortured, and sentenced to ten...
PEN/Opp publishes “Crisis and unrepresentability” – a new written lecture by the Syrian author, thinker and the Tucholsky Prize winner Yassin Al-Haj Saleh. The lecture was previously presented in...
The Lebanese paradox can be formulated as follows: while the Lebanese idea of an independent state, recognised and proclaimed by all its citizens, has expanded and survived a terrible war, the...
In this article, the Lebanese author and lawyer Alexandre Najjar shortly explains the historical significance of Lebanese freedom of expression for the Arab world and the challenges it is facing today...
Following the catastrophic explosion in the port of Beirut on August 4 last year, writing became impossible for the Lebanese writer Najwa Barakat. Now that she is attempting to get back to her writing...
Today it is exactly one year since the port explosion in Beirut occurred. Over 200 people died and as many became homeless. PEN/Opp asked Bissane El-Cheikh, a respected Lebanese journalist, to write a...
Ahmad Beydoun, born in 1943 in Beirut, is a sociologist by profession and leftist intellectual. He has authored a dozen remarkable books on Lebanese historiography, its political system, the civil war...
This article contains excerpts from the author’s report, Lebanon’s Disadvantaged Face a Long, Uphill Battle (2021) published by a SKL International, which is conducting a SIDA-funded project in...
Jordan is the country where the Arab Spring did not take place. The Hashemite Kingdom has survived and the regime remains stable. Maha Alautoom, a Jordanian poet and academic (born 1973), claims in...
When we headed towards the journalism, we met Yaroub Aleesa (born 1969 in the Syrian province of Hama). He picked us out of the confusion of the streets and led us into the house of journalism where...
The task of the translator is to facilitate the love between the original and its shadow, says Gayatri Spivak. The poet and translator Helena Boberg (b. 1974) in this essay discusses the role of...
In this text, the pseudonym Jafaar looks back from his European life in exile on his and other dissidents' experiences of arrests and torture from Egyptian prisons. The notes are divided by colours...
The poet and translator Samira Negrouche writes from within Algeria as a country marked by grief, she keeps returning to this: the silence around the heritage, the lack of a cultural infrastructure...
“When life finally reached us / I was inside a coffin running around,” writes the Iraqi poet Ali Thareb in one of his early poems. Ali was born in 1988 in the city of Babil in Iraq. These lines...
Naljaa Altom is a Sudanese poet, writer, translator, academic, and intellectual activist. She was born in Khartoum in 1975 and since a few years back she lives in Sweden as a dissident. She also...
