Advocacy & Aid: Writers in Peril
Host an Empty Chair
PEN Canada hosts Empty Chairs at its public events and at literary festivals across Canada as an act of solidarity with imprisoned writers.
The chair showcases the life and work of an author or journalist who has been targeted, threatened or jailed for peaceful dissent, and resisted censorship at considerable personal cost.
Get Involved
We can’t do it alone. To amplify the cases of these writers in peril, PEN Canada has welcomed dozens of other literary and civil society partners who have participated in this program.
If you would like to host an Empty Chair at a literary event or reading in Canada, please contact our office. PEN Canada will provide assets, including speaking notes, a printable Empty Chair image, and social media assets, as well as any other guidance you require.
Contact us at queries[at]pencanada[dot]ca.
Have you hosted an Empty Chair at an event? Send us your pictures or videos so we can share your efforts with our community.
About the Cases
Who will your Empty Chair be for?
PEN Canada is focused on the advocacy of our centre's Honorary Members and current cases, and an Empty Chair is one way you can help raise awareness. Recent PEN Canada Empty Chairs include the Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi, the British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, the Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai, and Cuban poet María Cristina Garrido Rodríguez.
Learn about our current cases.The history and impact of the Empty Chair
Liu Xiaobo Memorial in Ottawa.
The Empty Chair is a decades-long tradition of PEN centres around the world. For writers that are imprisoned, the knowledge that those in the outside world are advocating for them – with an Empty Chair, solidarity letters, or petitions to authorities – can be a profound realization. In PEN’s centenary archive, Ma Thida, an Honorary Member of PEN Canada, and chair of the PEN International Writers in Prison committee, recalls the moment when she learned that she had been chosen as one of PEN’s Empty Chairs:
“How can I express the feeling of encouragement or empowerment I felt when I was told that an Empty Chair was being presented on my behalf, while sitting alone in so much physical pain in the corner of a solitary cell?
This made PEN International a dream organization for me to be part of – an organization focused mainly on the profession of writing and freedom of expression, rather than ethnicity, religion, skin colour, gender or anything else. I was once recognized as being part of it when I was not there. Now, I can honour and embrace other writers who become Empty Chairs like I was. What a good feeling!”
The concept of the Empty Chair has extended beyond PEN centres: an Empty Chair was used to mark the absence of PEN Honorary Members Liu Xiaobo and Narges Mohammadi at their Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies, in 2010 and 2023 respectively.
The impact of the program within Canada includes the Liu Xiaobo Memorial in Ottawa, which PEN Canada championed alongside Amnesty International and the Toronto Association for Democracy in China. The statue is a bronze replica of the “empty chair” by Ruth Abernethy, a Canadian sculptor whose iconic works include the Glenn Gould statue at CBC in Toronto and the Oscar Peterson statue at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Liu Xiaobo died in prison in 2017. The statue was unveiled in Ottawa in 2019.