What is the significance of culture and literature for an oppressed people and a forbidden language? How is literature kept alive when language is strangled? The Kurdish writer Suzan Samancis tries to...
Former president of Ukrainian PEN Andrey Kurkov is one of the most translated Ukrainian writers. Kurkov received great international attention with the book Death and the Penguin. Since the beginning...
Firat Ceweri is the guest editor of this issue number "I see you in a glowing amber", a line from Kurdish poet Farhad Shakely's poem "Send an ember, one night, to see in my dreams". He provides an...
Ceren Aslan writes news and articles on political developments in Turkey and around the world, especially on women's and LGBTI+ journalism. For seven years, she worked in various positions as a...
In this nuanced literary essay, Putin opponent Dmitry Kuzmin tries to answer the question of whether all Russian culture is evil. He is a Ukrainian-to-Russian translator and editor-in-chief of the...
Speech at Mårbacka was performed during the Literature Festival at Mårbacka on July 30, 2022. Like many people in Ukraine after February 2022, the author of the speech, Olena Stepanenko, writes russia...
It is often said that artwork centered around war can be created only after some time has passed. Distance is needed to comprehend terrible losses and daily pain. The time of war is a time for...
Photographer: Mykhaylo Palinchak.
November 19 2022
Neda is a Kurdish woman and human rights activist who participates in and leads the protests in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj in Iran. The regime's forces have occupied the center of the city and the...
Sayed Abutaleb Mozaffari has taken an interest in the impact of political events on contemporary Afghan literature. In this article he deals with the relationship between poetry and politics...
Elyas Nawandish is an Afghan journalist and editor at the popular digital magazine Etilaat Roz. As a journalist, he worked in the past half a decade to promote freedom of expression, propagate...
Philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko gives a brief look into the history of ideas to help us reflect on what is happening now. He advocates a critical approach to Russian culture which, according to him...
In this travel diary, Tetyana Teren writes about the literary city of Kharkiv. The diary was written in June during a train trip she made from Kyiv to Kharkiv together with five Ukrainian PEN writers...
As the Russian attack on Ukraine wreaks destruction and creates millions of refugees, many of Ukraine's writers have found themselves turning to activism by joining volunteer groups, the Armed Forces...
Aziz Royesh, renowned teacher in Afghanistan, born in 1969 in Kabul. He founded the Marifat School in Kabul. In 2015, he was one of ten nominees for the International "Teacher of the Year Award" by...
This article, written and published on January 18 in German by the Ukrainian author and publisher Kateryna Mischenko, is a prologue to PEN/Opp's upcoming Ukraine issue, which will be launched in ten...
