PEN Canada celebrates literature, defends freedom of expression and aids writers in peril.
The event opens with a screening of the short film, Codename Sally, documenting the extraordinary efforts of a handful of PEN Canada members to bring Salman Rushdie in total secrecy and under heavy security, to the stage of the Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto for the PEN Benefit thirty years ago.
TORONTO, ON, October 12, 2022 – Award-winning journalist and crime analyst Luis Horacio Nájera is the recipient of the 2022 PEN Canada-Humber College Writers-in-Exile Scholarship, which provides peer mentorship to …
AVA HOMA CONTRIBUTED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 26, 2022 Ava Homa is the Nautilus Book award-winning author of Daughters of Smoke and Fire. Among the innumerable viral …
JOHN RALSTON SAUL CONTRIBUTED TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 28, 2022 John Ralston Saul is president emeritus of PEN International. His 14 books include The Collapse of Globalism …
GRACE WESTCOTT SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 26, 2022 Thirty years ago, PEN Canada, a non-partisan organization that supports freedom of expression in Canada and writers endangered …
PEN Canada is thrilled to be partnering with Wordfest on the SuperFan Showcase series, in which notable Canadians engage in wide-ranging, generous conversation about writing and ideas with their favourite authors. When we approached Yann Martel, he loved the idea of an in-person show, but thought he would be the host, given how much he enjoys André Alexis’s work. Actually, it was André who asked for Yann – which demonstrates that this 75-minute event is going to be well-grounded in mutual admiration (although they will likely both recoil at the notion of super-fandom). Intelligent. Self-effacing. Unpredictable. Not to be missed.
Fareh Malik is a spoken word poet from Hamilton, Ontario and the winner of the 2022 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. His new book Streams that Lead Somewhere is available from Mawenzi Press. In its citation the New Voices Award jury praised Malik’s “tenderness and throat-grabbing use of imagery” and his “wide range of voices and tones to convey a nuanced spectrum of emotions and a laser sharp critique of Canada’s blatant and covert systemic racism.”
Dawit Isaak and his colleagues are the longest detained journalists in the world today. September 23, 2022 will mark 21 years of detention. Their cases and causes are not only heartbreaking and egregiously unjust, but emblematic of the global assault on media freedom by authoritarian regimes, which continues to intensify under the cover of a global pandemic of impunity.
TORONTO, September 6, 2022 — Shams Erfan, a 24-year-old Hazara refugee from Afghanistan, has been chosen as the 2022 PEN Writer-in-Residence at George Brown College.
“Free Speech is the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.” — Salman Rushdie PEN Canada, Penguin Random House Canada, Toronto International Festival of Authors and Writers’ Trust of Canada …