Rasha Alqasim, exile writer from Iraq, writes a furious, desperate poem about displacement and its aftermath

"Don’t dance like a girl / I will dance / Don’t move like a girl / I will move"

Yasaman R. Choube was born in Iran and now lives in exile. For PEN/Opp she has written a moving story about love, oppression and loss.

Romeo Oriogun is a poet from Nigeria, a country where homosexuality is criminalised and can give up to fourteen years of prison. In Nigeria, the publishing of queer texts is restricted and even if...

Cuban poet Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo was forced to leave his home country in 2013 after having been denounced as a “traitor” to his country and accused of carrying out “counter-revolutionary” activities...

Poet and journalist Haile Bizen is known in his native Eritrea by the epithet “the man who broke the silence”. He was forced to flee the country after repeated persecution and systematic interrogation...

Iranian poet, LGBT and human rights activist Elham Malekpoor has published several collections of poetry, most of which have been censored in Iran. She particularly deals with child labour and queer...

Syrian poet, Housam Al-Mosilli, was forced to flee Syria in 2012 after he was imprisoned three times and repeatedly tortured. Today, he lives in exile in Turkey. In the poem, “Diary of the silent,” he...

“Blood and ash from the stolen Arabian spring / have penetrated the mornings, evenings and nights,” writes Syrian poet Bandar Abdulhamid in his collection of poems. The brutal reality of Syria is...

Syrian poet Amira Abul Husn is one of those who have chosen to remain in the war-torn country, using her pen to bear witness to all that is going on around her. In her poetry, she depicts fragments of...

The pseudonym Pandora is one the most influential poets in Burma today. In 2012, she published an anthology entitled Tuning: An Anthology of Myanmar Women Poets, which is the first book of its kind...

“It is only this generation of 20- and 30-year-olds that are able to write about the conditions here and now, and view the Soviet Union as a purely historical era,” writes critic Natasha Perova...

The poet Kirill Medvedev is today considered to be one of the most promising poets of his generation. He was also one of the activists who openly protested the trial of Pussy Riot last year, when he...