Zia Qasemi, born 1975 in Behsud, is an Afghan poet, author and also guest editor for this issue. He has published two novels and three collections of poems in Iran and Afghanistan and has won several...
Dara Abdallah is a Syrian poet and writer, born in the city of Qamishli in 1990. He lives in Berlin since 2013, and studies at the Faculty of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Humboldt University. He...
In the so-called transition period (2011-2021) in Burma/Myanmar, representations in media and social media of interrelations between Buddhists and Muslims have predominantly been those of violence...
This text, signed by the pseudonym E.V., closely describes the course of events surrounding the liquidation of the Belarusian PEN and the Writers' Union. The liquidation was part of the massive...
More than 36,000 people have been arrested in Belarus over the past year for political reasons. The author, Andrej Dyńko, is still under criminal investigation. His colleagues, the editors of Naša...
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...
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...
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...
