I believe there is no greater and more abject violation against a people than the act of putting them behind bars; prison is a manifestation of the failure of reason on the part of the powerful, an inarticulate dread to...
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Writers converse in solitude with their words. By the nature of their work, they are amongst the loneliest people on earth. But writers in prison suffer a particularly acute and perverse castigation in their loneliness. They are punished precisely for...
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The 27th of April 2019 marks 25 years of democracy in South Africa. At PEN SA we find ourselves thinking carefully not only about the urgencies of present and future freedoms, but also about our country’s past. For the last...
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Following up on the Media Institute of Southern Africa’s State of Media Freedom report, which we shared last week, PEN International has released its 2017 Case List, in which our colleagues have detailed threats to freedom of expression worldwide over...
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PEN South Africa notes with gladness that Cameroonian writer and Stony Brook college professor Patrice Nganang has been freed from detention in Cameroon. As Suzanne Nossel, Executive Director of PEN America wrote in a press release earlier this week: He was...
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