Advocacy & Aid

Rui Umezawa is the author of such books as The Truth About Death and Dying and Strange Light Afar: Tales of the Supernatural from Old Japan. This piece was originally published in the 2025/2026 PEN Canada Annual Report.

This summer, PEN International, together with PEN Eritrea in Exile and other PEN Centres, will launch a global campaign demanding urgent proof of life, accountability, and justice for Dawit Isaak and the world’s 12 longest-imprisoned writers — learn more about the campaign.

On the day in 2010 when I first walked into PEN Canada’s office, the sky was hopeful and blue. It looked less hopeful when I left after learning of an Eritrean dissident, whose story I still carry with me today.

By then Dawit Isaak had already been missing for close to ten years. In September 2001, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki forced the closure of his country’s independent media, and twelve journalists were imprisoned for dissent. Isaak was arrested on September 23.

He was a playwright as well as a journalist. He had returned to Eritrea in 1993 after a six-year exile in Sweden, where he’d acquired Swedish citizenship. He was never tried or formally charged, and, although he was unexpectedly released for two days in November 2005, he was immediately detained again while seeking medical attention. Since then, his wife and three children have received neither contact nor proof of life.

In 2011, PEN Canada marked the tenth anniversary of Isaak’s arrest with a public event at what was then Ryerson University. I stood in the corner of a room in the School of Journalism as celebrated authors Camilla Gibb, Karen Connelly, Sheila Heti, Rosemary Sullivan, and Susan Swan read letters they’d written to Isaak and his colleagues, assuring them that they’d not been forgotten.

Later that year on November 15, PEN’s Day of the Imprisoned Writer, I joined other volunteers in stopping passersby on Toronto’s streets, asking each to pose for photos while holding a picture of Isaak. Those who obliged were featured on PEN’s website. Fifteen years later, I wonder how many still remember him.

In the years since, Brendan de Caires, PEN Canada’s executive director, and I have spoken about Isaak at every opportunity to scholars, writers, and politicians. We’ve arranged publications of op-ed pieces in major Canadian newspapers. We’ve participated in events where members of the Eritrean diaspora opposed to Afwerki’s regime came close to blows with its supporters.

A fierce ally who always stood alongside us then was Aaron Berhane. He was the former editor-in-chief of the Eritrean newspaper Setit, who, unlike Dawit, was able to evade capture in 2001 to eventually settle in Canada. Aaron was reunited with his family nine years later, but, in May 2021, COVID-19 took him from all of us.

That fall, the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, along with PEN Canada and other international advocacy groups, hosted a panel discussion on Dawit’s then 20-year imprisonment and called for sanctions against Eritrean officials responsible. Another petition was presented to the Canadian House of Commons in 2023.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Isaak’s disappearance. PEN International, with PEN Centres around the world, has renewed the call for his freedom, as well as those of the others imprisoned in 2001. The whereabouts of Isaak and the rest remain unknown. We don’t know whether we will ever see them again. But the Booker Award-winning novelist Ben Okri has published an open letter to the writers, assuring them, just as the Canadian writers did in 2011, that they are not forgotten.

2025/2026 PEN Canada Annual Report

A Place at the Table: 100 Years of PEN in Canada

Edited by Sarmishta Subramanian
Design: soapboxdesign.com
Illustrations: tarahardyillustration.com

Contributors include José Teodoro, Charlie Foran, Adnan Khan, and Rui Umezawa, with reflections from previous presidents Margaret Atwood, Marian Botsford Fraser, Randy Boyagoda, Haroon Siddiqui, and Grace Westcott.

Read the full report.