In Iran in November 2019 the whole of the Internet was shut down. 83 million people were suddenly isolated from the world. This was the regime’s answer to the people’s protest against rising petrol...
In troubled Kashmir the Internet has recently been shut down for 164 days. This has been the longest ever shut down of the Internet in a democratic country. On January 25 the government restored the...
Today China is the digital world leader. Here we find the most Internet users and here the most advanced techniques concerning Internet censorship are being tested. How is it possible that China...
“In conditions of shrinking freedom and fewer independent media, the internet became filled with jokes, anecdotes and lampoons,” says the Russian author and human rights activist Liza Aleksandrova...
The writer and researcher Manuel Bolom Pale belongs to the Tsotsil people, the largest indigenous group in Mexico’s southernmost state Chiapas. “Writing in Tsotsil means reviving and reconnecting with...
“Globalization is without a doubt a flood that will entomb more than half the languages of the world under water during the twenty-first century,” writes Carles Torner, a Catalonian author and the...
According to the UN more than one million Uyghurs are detained in so called re-education camps in the Xinjiang province in North Eastern China. Their crime is that they speak the ‘wrong’ language and...
The right to use the Kurdish language has been a major controversy in Turkey all through the Republic’s existence. Ciwanmerd Kulek belongs to the younger generation of Kurdish writers who out of...
How far do our words travel? This is the question that author Simona Škrabec asks in her essay about the importance of small, marginal, and “invisible” languages. She starts off in Chiapas at a three...
What is it to be Jts’ibajom te jbats’I k’optik – meaning, what is it to be a writer writing in one’s indigenous language? Does it entail a certain responsibility? Resistance? Defense? Taking a stand...
Writer and human rights activist Jason Y. Ng writes for PEN/Opp about how the long arm of the Chinese mainland stretches ever further into Hong Kong. Since the handover to Chinese sovereignty in 1997...
It has been over 1,400 days since the Swedish publisher Gui Minhai was imprisoned in China. This is a letter to Gui Minhai written by his publisher colleague Eva Gedin. “You cannot hear us but we are...
Jessica Yeung is a docent of translation at Hong Kong Baptist University where her research includes minority cultures. In this text she depicts the common denominators that weave together Hong Kong...
What is Hong Kong literature? Louise Law addresses this question in her text exploring the various literary tendencies in Hong Kong. This city, informed by linguistic and cultural diversity, is...
In “Forbidden Words and Architecture in Hong Kong” author and journalist Ilaria Maria Sala sketches the development of architecture in Hong Kong as it opens more and more doors to Beijing and the...
