A PEN year-in-review
Thank you to all of our patrons, members, donors, supporters, volunteers, writers, readers, peers, and friends who have been a part of the PEN community in the past year. We …
Blog
After Assad: five Syrian and Arab writers on what’s next
The Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, has been a devastating and prolonged conflict led by the Syrian government under Bashar al-Assad. The conflict has caused immense humanitarian suffering, …
The life of a surveilled citizen: what is Digital Transnational Repression?
by Brendan de Caires (Executive Director, PEN Canada) Twenty years ago, Florian von Donnersmarck’s dark film “The Lives of Others” showed how easily a nation state – in the form …
Madeleine Thien writes to Jimmy Lai | Day of the Imprisoned Writer
This year for Day of the Imprisoned Writer, PEN is calling for urgent international action from November 15 – 29 to protect four writers targeted for their peaceful free expression …
The history behind the Graeme Gibson Talk
The Graeme Gibson Talk is an annual conversation between writers with expert knowledge of an urgent political, social, cultural or economic issue. The event was established in 2021 to honour …
Poetry, fairy tales and political oppression — a Q&A with Maria Saba
PEN Canada asked the Iranian-Canadian writer Maria Saba about politics, freedom of expression and the challenges faced by Iranian writers and journalists in diaspora communities. PEN Canada: Iranian lawyers, writers, …
Writers and The World | Kern Carter writes for the Tomorrow Club
Kern is the author of the recently published YA novel Boys and Girls Screaming (DCB/Cormorant Books), and the upcoming YA novel And Then There Was Us (Tundra/Penguin Random House/2024). He …
An Adventure Like This | remembering Alice Munro
Photo: Alice Munro speaks at a 2009 PEN Canada event at the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Written by Bruce Walsh “Smallest photo the Globe ever ran,” we laughed. But …
A Question of Trust: reporting on Ciudad Juárez’s serial killings
By Luis Horacio Nájera In the summer of 1995, while working as a crime reporter for El Diario, Ciudad Juárez’s most influential newspaper, my duties as a journalist clashed with …
A Climate of Sorrow
By Marcello Di Cintio For the past six months, since the most recent horrors in Gaza began, I’ve been using my Gazan friends’ Facebook activity as proof-of-life. I begin to …