"I want to sit down with you and talk. I want to ask about your books, about what it was like to build Luật Khoa and The Vietnamese Magazine from nothing. But as you wrote yourself, it is 'too easy'...
Publicist and democracy activist Phạm Đoan Trang was arrested on October 6, 2020, when police and security service officials raided her apartment in Ho Chi Minh City. This text was published on her...
The Vietnamese author Phạm Đoan Trang was imprisoned in 2020 after years of harassment. She is now serving a nine-year prison sentence for “propaganda against the state.” PEN/Opp is publishing two...
In the novel The Backstreets by imprisoned Uyghur author Perhat Tursun, a lonely man wanders around Ürümqi in search of a place to spend the night. As he wanders the streets, he reflects on his life...
In The Philippines and Freedom of Expression Conchitina Cruz describes the attempted neoliberal takeover and militarization of universities, issues that are of particular global relevance in this...
The pieces in this collection are written by Filipino women political prisoners held in the maximum security prison of the Correctional Institution for Women in Mandaluyong City, Metro Manila, the...
Text: Conchitina Cruz and Adam David
October 08 2025
Faye Cura, publisher of Gantala Press, a Filipino feminist small press, writes about the power of dissent, boycott, citizen protest and protest literature as resolute resistance.
Gina Alexandra Srmabekian is a writer whose work grapples with transgenerational trauma, memory and identity. She writes about grief because it is the most powerful articulation of love.
In the wake of the 2020 war over Artsakh and the ethnic cleansing of the Republic that followed in 2023 by Azerbaijan, memory has become a battlefield as fraught as the land itself. “The Spoils of War...
This is a letter penned in jail by Amanda Echanis to her father, peace consultant Randall “Ka Randy” Echanis. Amanda, a writer and organizer of the Amihan National Federation of Peasant Women, was...
Text: Amanda Socorro Lacaba Echanis
October 08 2025
Myles Albasin had just graduated from University of the Philippines-Cebu when she and five other young activists were arrested in Mabinay, Negros Oriental on March 3, 2018. Like many detained...
On 27 March 2025, Swedish author and journalist Joakim Medin is detained at Istanbul airport, where he had travelled to report on the nationwide protests following the arrest of Istanbul Mayor and...
In February 2021, the military in Myanmar staged a coup against the democratically elected government. The massive protests that followed were brutally suppressed, and freedom of expression has been...
