Dareen Tatour is a Palestinian poet, playwright, and photographer from the Arab town Reineh between Nazareth and Qana in Galilee. Body and soul, she is an activist—her resistance to the occupation of...
On Aug. 20, 2020, Sudanese poet Abdel Wahab Latinos drowned in the English Channel with an unknown number of African immigrants. Death and the desire to diminish were frequent themes in Abdel Wahab’s...
We woke up. We heard voices calling us, we heard our own voices crying out. The people’s uprising in Belarus became a mighty wave erupting from somewhere that looked like nowhere, which wasn’t true...
The crackdown on the peaceful protesters during the first days of August was strikingly violent. Many were arrested and beaten, at least one person was killed. In ”The Unprotected”, a series of poems...
In early September, the poet, musician, and PEN member Uladzimir Liankevich was arrested during a peaceful manifestation in Minsk. He was sentenced to six days in prison. He was again arrested in...
On October 21, one of Belarus' foremost poets, Dmitry Strotsev (b. 1963) disappeared without a trace. The day after, his name appeared on a list of interns at the infamous Akrestsina Detention Centre...
Aaiun Nin, Angolan spoken word poet and artist, was born in Luanda but currently lives in Copenhagen. Nin’s work touches on themes of racism and sexuality and it is an ongoing examination of pain and...
Matthew Cheng — poet, critic, and editor of the magazine Voice and Verse. He has published three collections of poetry and is the co-author of Wait and See, an anthology of poetry by six young Hong...
In the poem “A bird clock” the Icelandic poet Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir speaks to us from an unknown place far away. The poem becomes a personal meditation on the interaction of the quiet moments of...
With her politically loaded texts the performing poet and social justice lawyer Arinda Daphine calls for action. She wants to awaken her audience and contribute to change in Uganda — a country...
Tahir Hamut is considered one of the foremost modernist poets in the Uyghur language today. For three years in the 1990s, he was jailed in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region after being falsely accused...
“There’s no land for us,” writes the poet Erkan Kadir in his poem “Poverty” about the tragic destiny of the Uyghur in China. In 2016 he left the Xinjiang Province in China for studies in Turkey, but...
In 2003 the writer and poet Abdushukur Muhammet fled the oppression in the Xinjiang Province in China. Today he lives with his family in Sweden. His three published works in Uyghur can no longer be...
In 2015 the Iranian poet and activist Fatemeh Ekhtesari was sentenced to 99 lashes and eleven and a half years of imprisonment for alleged crimes against the Islamic regime—immoral conduct and...
Can one be imprisoned for having published a poem on one’s Facebook page? The answer is yes—in Uganda. In August 2019 the Ugandan writer and women’s rights activist Stella Nyanzi was sentenced to...
