Dear Friends and Supporters–
In spite of these challenging times, PEN Canada continues its important work defending freedom of expression, supporting writers in peril and celebrating the power of words to change the world. We are profoundly grateful for your generous donations and moral support which make this all possible.
In September we reached the $50,000 fundraising goal for our matching campaign with Margaret Atwood. This welcome financial support has helped ensure the delivery of our programs to the end of the fiscal year. I’d like to take a moment to review some of these exciting initiatives.
The 2020 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Prize received a record 175 entries. This year’s winner is the poet Emily Dial. The judges described Dial’s work as “sophisticated, surprising, intelligent, compassionate, and formally inventive” in the way it “connects the past to the present to the future, connects the personal to the public and touches in ways that are more than glancing on such timely and complex considerations as race, gender, and violence.” Dial, 25, a queer, triracial poet, grower, and educator originally from California lives in Tkaronto (Toronto, Ontario), where she works in urban agriculture. As part of the New Voices Prize, she will be mentored by the poet and dancer Aisha Sasha John.
This year’s PEN Canada-Humber College Writers-in-Exile Scholarship was awarded to Maria Saba, an award-winning Iran-born writer, storyteller and arts educator who has published three books. Since its establishment in 2017, the scholarship has provided a full scholarship for an exiled writer to attend the Humber School for Writers’ graduate certificate program in creative writing. Maria will be mentored by David Bezmozgis, a three-time Giller Award nominee and School for Writers creative director. Over 30 weeks, she will work closely with David on a book-length English-language manuscript of fiction or non-fiction.
We have also been busy in the courts. In August we successfully intervened in the CCLA’s lawsuit against Ontario’s Federal Carbon Tax Transparency Act which required gas station proprietors to display “carbon tax stickers” on their pumps or risk fines of up to $10,000 per day. The judge held that the provisions of the Act which mandated stickers on gas pumps were unconstitutional.
PEN also intervened in Ontario’s Superior Court to argue that the new provisions of Section 91(1) of the Canada Elections Act to prohibit the publication of false statements against “public figures” were overly broad. PEN was represented pro bono by Goddard Nasseri LLP who argued that the law would “restrict far more speech than the intentional dissemination of fake news that it was designed to address” by causing a chill on legitimate political speech.
In early November we learned that the Iranian lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, recipient of our 2011 and 2019 One Humanity Award had been released on a medical furlough. After her arrest two years ago on charges of collusion, spreading propaganda and insulting Iran’s supreme leader, Nasrin was sentenced in 2019 to a 38 year prison sentence with 148 lashes. She was recently hospitalised after several weeks of a hunger strike which ended in late September after 46 days. Reza Khandan, her husband, has confirmed Nasrin’s conditional release on Twitter.
In the last six months we have provided emergency grants to writers in Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Turkey and direct support to two human rights defenders, currently in exile, seeking asylum in Canada. We’ve also researched the impact of algorithms on freedom of expression in Mexico, the Philippines, the United Kingdom and Canada. One of the first person accounts from writers affected by online harassment can be found here.
We have been busily developing a program to deliver literary mentorship to Indigenous students in Thunder Bay. The project is being led by PEN board members Tanya Talaga and Anouchka Freybe.
Finally, we have relocated to Suite 244 at 401 Richmond Street West, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8. Please use this if you need to contact us by mail in the future; our phone numbers and email address remain the same.
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