Alireza Behnam, born in 1973 in Tehran, is one of the most influential young poets in Iran right now. Since 1991, he has published four collections of poems and translated a number of books into...

On September 7 2011, the police arrested the poet Alireza Roshan, who was accused of being part of a nonconformist minority group named “Gonabadi”. He was convicted on the basis of Article 610 of the...

President Ahmadinejad states that homosexuality does not exist in Iran and it is a crime according to the country's laws. What is even more rarely discussed is the perception of transsexuals, and how...

Puns and ambiguities are one of Luis Miguel Aguilar's trademarks. His poem entitled “Juárez” refers to both national hero Benito Juárez, 1806–1872, and the city of Juárez—the most dangerous place on...

“Humor is the foremost weapon of the weak,” said Turkish author Aziz Nesin. In this short play, the artist and poet Yeşim Ağaoğlu uses humor to show what is unrolling in her native country. Ağaoğlu...

Trials without end, shady evidence, and fabricated documents are a reality in today’s Turkish judicial system. Translator Petek Demir was tired of seeing his writer and journalist colleagues...

Gülsum Cengiz is one of the most acclaimed poets in Turkey. She wrote this poem during the 90s when Kurdish was a forbidden language in the prisons. In order to talk to her imprisoned son, a Kurdish...

Day by day, the censorship in Iran becomes stricter. The young Iranian poet Leili Galehdaran has therefore chosen to send her third collection, Sinior to the Swedish-located publisher Baran. If she...

In April the Swedish city of Uppsala received a new ICORN writer: the Iranian lawyer and poet Sedigheh Vasmaghi. After the election in 2009, she took part of the protest movement. She published poems...

It is way too early to talk about the “results” of the revolution in Egypt. Some commentators worry about that everything will remain the way it was, but the Egyptian writer Somaya Ramadan sees a slow...

The guest writer-relay has reached Iceland. The poet Mazen Maarouf—who has lived all his life as a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon—was during 2011 granted sanctuary in Reykjavík through the...