PEN World Voices next week!

Issue #14 of PEN America will arrive on Monday -- with copies going out to subscribers, PEN members, and bookstores shortly after -- along with news here about all the great stuff that's in it. In the meantime, a few highlights from the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, happening in New York City all next week.

These are ticketed events with limited seating, so if you're interested you should act soon. There are also many free events, next week; have a look at the whole schedule.

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Revolutionaries in the Arab World

Wednesday, April 27, 7:30 p.m.
92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center

Hear from experts and on-the-ground bloggers how social media and citizen journalism galvanize the revolution. In the borderless world of the Internet, where revolutionary ideas spread at lightning speed, will other despotic regimes collapse? Which ones? And how does an autocracy transition into a democracy, and at what cost? Alex Nunns, editor of Tweets from Tahrir -- a collection of key tweets from the activists who brought heady days of revolution to Egypt in early 2011 -- will be joined by Palestinian author/journalist Rula Jebreal (Miral), blogger Issandr El Amrani (The Arabist), Moroccan writer Abdellah Taia, and Moroccan-Dutch writer Adbelkader Benali to tackle these urgent questions.

Tickets: $20/$15 PEN Members, students with valid ID.

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China in Two Acts

Thursday, April 28, 7 p.m.
The Cooper Union, Great Hall

Born in Beijing and educated in the United States, New Yorker contributor Zha Jianying delivers unique insight into the rapidly changing world inside China, including the plights of the country's best-known artist Ai Wei Wei and Nobel peace Prize winner and political prisoner Liu Xiaobo. In a 30-minute presentation, Zha sheds light on the polarized political order and the cultural forces that are shaping the world’s most populous nation. Following Zha’s remarks, a panel of journalists and writers join her on stage for a lively debate of her assertions.

Tickets: $15/$10 PEN Members, students with valid ID.

Note: The Chinese governemnt has barred Liao Yiwu from attending the festival. Read more here.

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Poetry: The Second Skin
Friday, April 29, 7:30 pm
92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center

An evening of poetry and music curated and emceed by Laurie Anderson. With a stellar line-up of international poets, including John Burnside (Scotland), Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua), David-Dephy Gogibedashvili (Georgia), Hasina Gul (Pakistan), Yusef Komunyakaa (US), Juan Carlos Mestre (Spain), Joachim Sartorius (Germany), and Pia Tafdrup (Denmark).

Tickets: $25/$20 PEN and PSA Members, students with valid ID.

Dispatch from Oslo: Larry Siems

I had the honor of attending the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo today as an official representative of PEN American Center. The ceremony, with its empty chair representing imprisoned writer and laureate Liu Xiaobo, was stunning and perfectly pitched in an especially Norwegian way—austere and straightforward, principled and direct. There were three particularly sustained, heartfelt ovations: when Nobel Committee Chair Thorbjørn Jagland said, early in his speech, that the response of the Chinese government to the award has in a sense validated the award; when he said Liu has done nothing wrong and must be released; and when he placed the Nobel medal and citation on Liu’s empty chair. I sat near many of our Independent Chinese PEN Center colleagues and other legendary dissidents and activists, and right next to the daughter of Wang Bingzhang, a prominent pro-democracy activist now in his eighth year of a life sentence in China; you can just imagine what the ceremony meant to her and to them.

Two other huge highlights, post-ceremony: I visited a preview of the exhibition on Liu Xiaobo at the Nobel Peace Center that will open tomorrow. I was overwhelmed when I walked into the room, glanced over to the first wall you see, and there were three video monitors playing, from left to right, Liu Xia speaking in Beijing in March 2010, PEN’s New Year’s Eve rally, and Liu Xiaobo talking about freedom of expression. Across the room, flanking an enormous, beautiful photo of Liu, were two banners, one with Jeffrey Yang’s translation of Liu’s poem “Daybreak” and one with Don DeLillo’s text for Liu. There it was, for the world, so much of all of PEN’s amazing work.

Also touring the exhibition preview was Nancy Pelosi; as she was leaving she gave an impromptu press conference, in which she spoke with incredible humanity and passion about what this day means for so many who have worked (as she has) for so long to bring attention to China’s human rights record. Generous, eloquent, clearly moved by the ceremony and the exhibition, she did us all proud.




Here’s to Liu Xiaobo. Here’s to freedom of expression in China.










Larry Siems is the Freedom to Write and International Programs Director at PEN American Center.

Photographs, from top to bottom: Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony, Larry Siems; Nobel Peace Prize Exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center, Larry Siems; Torchlight Procession outside Oslo's Grand Hotel, where the laureate typically greets well-wishers, Marian Botsford Fraser.

The Nobel and other news

This morning, Mario Vargas Llosa, former president of PEN International, received the Nobel Prize for Literature. You can listen to his conversation with Salman Rushdie and Umberto Eco, which took place at PEN World Voices 2008, here.

Tomorrow, the Nobel committee will announce the recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. PEN is urging the committee to confer the award on Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned writer who would be the first citizen of China to receive the award. You can read all about PEN's campaign on his behalf here.

Next Wednesday, PEN will holds its annual awards ceremony. Anne Carson, Susan Choi, Don DeLillo, Paul Harding, Theresa Rebeck, and many others will be on hand to receive their awards, and the event is free, though seating is limited. If you would like to attend, RSVP to awards@pen.org.

The following Tuesday, October 19, PEN will present “State of Emergency: Censorship by Bullet in Mexico,” an event seeking to call attention to and discuss the silencing of Mexican journalists investigating drug violence in their country. Participants include Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Laura Esquivel, José Luis Martínez, Víctor Manuel Mendiola, Francine Prose, and Carmen Aristegui.

PEN round-up: Don DeLillo, World Voices, Mexican journalists, and more

As we put the finishing touches on the fall issue, the PEN office is bustling.

Today, the 2010 PEN Literary Award winners were announced. Among them, Don DeLillo, who answered questions from PEN (via fax) on the occasion:

PEN: Thanks to e-books, blogs, and social media, writers are arguably using new technology as never before. Stories are written using Twitter, novels as text messages, and there seems to be a reemergence of serial narratives. Do you think technology will have a considerable influence on fiction? Do you think it already has?

DeLillo: The question is whether the enormous force of technology, and its insistence on speeding up time and compacting space, will reduce the human need for narrative—narrative in the traditional sense. Novels will become user-generated. An individual will not only tap a button that gives him a novel designed to his particular tastes, needs, and moods, but he’ll also be able to design his own novel, very possibly with him as main character. The world is becoming increasingly customized, altered to individual specifications. This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people speak, write, and read. Here’s a stray question (or a metaphysical leap): Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page? Does the beauty and variability of our language depend to an important degree on the medium that carries the words? Does poetry need paper?

To celebrate DeLillo’s award, our fall issue will include his 1983 short story “Human Moments in World War III,” the beginning of which you can read on PEN.org. For the rest, pre-order your copy of the issue (or subscribe!).

And, if you’re in New York, join us for the 2010 PEN Literary Awards ceremony on October 13.

News of this year’s winners followed just a day after PEN announced its new Director of the World Voices Festival and Public Programs, László Jakab Orsós, who joins PEN from the Hungarian Cultural Center. Jakab is also an accomplished journalist and screenwriter. You can read more about him here. The 2011 World Voices Festival will be held from April 25 to May 1.

Lastly, a trio of announcements from the Freedom to Write department: Liao Yiwu (discussed previously on the blog) has finally been permitted to travel outside China; PEN writers urged the U.N. to abandon efforts to legally prohibit the defamation of religion; and several writers from Mexico and the United States (including DeLillo) will gather next month to discuss and call attention to the violent suppression of journalists in America’s neighbor to the south. Please join us if you can.

Liao Yiwu detained in China

As has been reported in The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, and elsewhere, the writer Liao Yiwu was detained at an airport in Sichuan Province on his way to Germany to attend lit.Cologne, one of the largest literary festivals in Europe.

Liao Yiwu is a member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC) and the author of the internationally acclaimed book The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up, which was inspired by the oral histories of Studs Terkel. The English translation by Wen Huang was partly funded by a grant from the PEN Translation Fund, and chapters of the book were published in The Paris Review. You can listen to Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch read from the book here, and you can listen to Katie Fishman reading an essay by Yiwu, “My Enemies, My Teachers,” here. (Update: Gourevitch writes about Liao’s detention for the “News Desk” blog at The New Yorker.)

According to the Times, Liao “had been warned in recent days not to attend the Festival, but insisted on exercising his right to travel freely. He was held at a detention center and questioned by police for three hours before he was permitted to go home. He is now under house arrest.”

After the Tiananmen Square protests, Liao wrote an epic poem, “Massacre,” and recorded himself reading it. The poem got him four years in prison. This is the thirteenth time he’s been detained by the Chinese goverment.

In an email to PEN American Center, Liao said: “Words alone cannot express my outrage. I’m a writer and never considered myself a political dissident. But Liu Xiaobo was right when he said, ‘To gain and preserve your freedom and dignity, there is no other way except to fight.’”

(The drawing of Liao Yiwu above, done over a newspaper article about his writing, is by Larry Roibal; click to enlarge.)

Rally tomorrow @ NYPL, 11 a.m.

Update: Read Brian Montopoli's report on the rally at CBSNews.com.

On the steps of the New York Public Library: Hilma Wolitzer, A.M. Homes, Edward Albee, E.L. Doctorow, Honor Moore, Jessica Hagedorn, Steve Eisenberg, Don DeLillo, and Victoria Redel. More photos here.



Tomorrow at 11 a.m., on the steps of the New York Public Library, E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Edward Albee, A.M. Homes, Honor Moore, and others will read briefly from Liu's writings and call for his release.

Liu was sentenced on Christmas to 11 years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power." Read the verdict; learn more about the case; then email Hu Jintao and tell him to release Liu Xiaobo.

JOIN PEN
FOR A RALLY FOR
THE RELEASE OF LIU XIAOBO

When: New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2009
Where: Front steps of the New York Public Library, 5th Ave. at 42nd St., New York City
What time: 11:00 a.m.

With E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Edward Albee, A.M. Homes, Honor Moore, and other PEN Members

Press who plan to attend should RSVP to sarah@pen.org

Liu Xiaobo's So-Called Crimes

Yesterday, the Chinese government sentenced writer Liu Xiaobo to 11 years in prison and an additional two years’ deprivation of political rights for “inciting subversion of state power.” PEN American Center President Kwame Anthony Appiah released this statement when the verdict was announced early on Christmas day.

As we have frequently noted, Liu is not only one of China’s most important and acclaimed dissident voices, he is also a PEN colleague. Liu was one of the founding members of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC), and he served as the center’s president from 2003 to 2007 and afterwards continued to serve on its board of directors.

Yesterday afternoon, Liu’s colleagues at ICPC sent us the first bits of the official verdict of the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court—the exact passages from Liu’s writing that were judged to be subversive.

Liu was sentenced to 11 years in prison for seven sentences from five articles he posted on the Internet and two sentences from Charter 08—a total of 224 Chinese characters. Here they are:

From “Further Questions about Child Slavery in China’s Kilns” (2007):

Since the Communist Party of China (CPC) took power, generations of CPC dictators have cared most about their own power and least about human life.

From “The CPC’s Dictatorial Patriotism” (2005):

The official patriotism advocated by the CPC dictatorship is a fallacious system of “substituting the party for the country.” The essence of this patriotism is to demand that the people love the dictatorship, the one-party rule, and the dictators. It usurps patriotism in order to inflict disasters on the nation and calamities on the people.

From “The Many Aspects of CPC Dictatorship”:

Thus, all of the tricks used by the CPC are stop-gap measures for the dictators to preserve the last phase of their power and will not be able to support for long this dictatorial edifice that is already showing countless cracks.

From “Changing the Regime by Changing Society” (2006):

Changing the Regime by Changing Society

From “Can it be that the Chinese People Deserve Only ‘Party-Led Democracy’?” (2006):

For the emergence of a free China, placing hope in the ruler of a “New Deal” is an idea far worse than placing hope in the continuous expansion of the “new force” among the people.

From “The Negative Effects of the Rise of Dictatorship on World Democratization” (2006):

[Nothing was actually quoted from the article]

From Charter 08 (2008):

“One-party monopolization of ruling privileges should be abolished….”; and

“…to establish China’s federal republic under the structure of democracy and constitutionalism.”

I can't imagine a clearer violation of the right to freedom of expression as it is guaranteed under both international law and China’s own constitution, than to send someone to prison for 11 years for subversion on the basis of these sentences.

In a statement released yesterday in London, International PEN President John Ralston Saul responded this way to China’s claims that international protests over Liu Xiaobo’s trial amounted to interference in its internal affairs:

“Liu Xiaobo's case is about agreed international human rights standards, not merely the internal affairs of China. China is signatory to international treaties and conventions, and cannot be given a free pass when it acts against its own and international standards.”

He is absolutely right. We have entered a new phase in the fight to win Liu Xiaobo’s release; stay tuned for more information about what you can do to help in the days and weeks ahead. Meanwhile, one of the first things we all can do is read more of the essays these supposedly subversive words are taken from in their full context. Human Rights in China has excerpts, with links to the full original pieces in Chinese, here.

Then we should repeat the offending phrases over and over and send them around the world.

Email Hu Jintao, tell him to release Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo, poet and dissident, will be tried tomorrow morning in China (8 p.m. tonight Eastern Standard Time) for “inciting subversion of state power.” He was charged after helping to write Charter 08, a manifesto calling for democratic reforms, and he faces up to fifteen years if convicted.

Over on the main PEN website, you'll find a very easy to use form for emailing Hu Jintao, President of the People’s Republic of China, and Cao Jianmin, the Procurator General, demanding Liu Xiaobo's release.

So help us flood their inboxes. And stay tuned.

Human Rights Day 2009: the Good, the Bad, and the Hopeful

Most of us tend to measure a year's passage by our birthdays, but in the human rights world, each year is marked and measured by December 10: International Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the birth of the Declaration of Human Rights. Each December 10 has meaning, of course, but 2009 is particularly poignant.

We've witnessed the murders of more writers, journalists, and human rights defenders than we'd ever want to count this year, including Natalia Estemirova, the courageous Chechen activist who was abducted outside her home in Grozny and murdered on July 15.

We've also witnessed the mass arrests of writers and scholars in places like Iran, which responded to popular protests over this year’s election results by handing out outrageous sentences to people like Kian Tajbakhsh, who is now serving 15 years in jail.

And we've witnessed countries blatantly defying their own laws, such as in China's arrest and detention of our own PEN colleague, Liu Xiaobo, who is now spending his second Human Rights Day in silence.

Just two days ago, on the anniversary of his detention, Beijing police handed over Liu's case to the prosecution, which means that he may now be tried for "inciting subversion of state power" within the next month and a half. If convicted, he could face up to 15 years in prison.

In a statement PEN American Center released along with the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC), of which Liu is a former president, Tienchi Liao, ICPC's newly-elected leader, said:

“In order to protect their right to freedom of expression, our brave colleagues are willing to risk their physical freedom. But the authorities cannot put all people who want to express their own thoughts into prison. We are too many.”

And herein lies the good of this story, this troubling year of deaths and arrests and long sentences: people around the world are standing up even straighter, even taller, for their own rights, and are linking arms to protect and fight for the rights of others.

Liu Xiaobo's colleagues, who joined with him last year in signing Charter 08, today released another open letter supporting him. In it, the signatories challenged authorities to arrest all of them as well, for signing this groundbreaking declaration, for sharing the same ideas, for invoking their right to freedom of expression, guaranteed by their own constitution.

And so here at PEN in New York, we are commemorating Human Rights Day by paying tribute to all these brave men and women, in China and all over the world, who are using their pens, using their voices, to stand up for human rights, regardless of the consequences. We stand with them, we stand behind them, and we will continue to fight for them until all our pens, our voices, are free.

As of this morning, at great personal risk, 164 of the original 303 signatories of Charter 08 had added their names to the open letter, entitled "We Are Willing to Share Responsibility with Liu Xiaobo."



JOIN US in taking action for Liu Xiaobo: >> Send a letter to the Chinese government.


photo of Liu Xiaobo and his wife, Liu Xia, courtesy of the Independent Chinese PEN Center.

Obama in China & other links

As you may have heard, Barack Obama has addressed the matter of press freedom on his visit to China. PEN American Center has been calling for Obama to speak up for free expression on this visit (see the letter signed by PEN president K. Anthony Appiah). It appears that Obama’s comments are being censored from Chinese news reports.

A “leading” member of president Nicolas Sarkozy’s party in France, one Éric Raoult, is arguing that the latest winner of the Prix Goncourt, the nation’s highest literary prize, should “be censured and asked to recant” for comments she made back in August about “the climate of heavy policing and surveillance [under Sarkozy].” Marie Ndiaye won the Goncourt for Trois femmes puissantes (Three Powerful Women), and she is the first black woman to win the award.

Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin, excerpted in PEN America 10: Fear Itself, is up for the National Book Award this week, and it also tops Amazon’s “Best of 2009” (via The Millions).

Back around Halloween, Gigantic talked with Brian Evenson about horror movies. (Evenson’s brilliant and eerie story “Windeye” appears in PEN America 11: Make Believe and is also available on the PEN website.)

Lastly, The Rumpus has several good literary pieces up:

a long interview with Paul Auster, whose latest novel, Invisible, was deemed his finest ever by Clancy Martin in The New York Times Book Review

excerpts from a piece by Sigrid Nunez on Susan Sontag (who said, “I saw the best writers of my generation destroyed by teaching,” Nunez recalls) that was recently published in Tin House (read Nunez's story "Rapture Children" in our new issue)

and a tribute to An African in Greenland by Terese Svoboda (“I understand my curiosity about sex but why do I adore reading about bad food?” she asks), whose lovely contribution to our “Make Believe” forum is up on the PEN website, along with a bunch of other interesting responses (post your own!)

Poems by Liu Xiaobo, translated by Jeffrey Yang, read by Paul Auster

I’ve mentioned Liu Xiaobo before. The renowned literary critic, writer, and political activist was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in 1989 when he decided to return to China to support the pro-democracy movement. He staged a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square and led calls for a broad-based, sustainable democratic movement. He helped prevent further bloodshed by supporting and advancing a call for non-violence.

He spent two years in prison for his troubles, and three years of “reeducation through labor” beginning in 1996 after he publicly questioned the role of the single-party system and called for dialogue between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama of Tibet.

More recently, he co-authored Charter 08, a declaration calling for political reform that has been signed by hundreds of individuals from all walks of life throughout China. He was detained in December of last year and formally arrested in June, charged with “inciting subversion of state power.” If convicted, he could face up to 15 years in prison. Liu Xia, his wife, has only been permitted to visit him twice.

Friends of Liu gave some of his poems to Larry Siems and Sarah Hoffman, who have been spearheading PEN American Center’s China Campaign, last year, and for the most recent issue of PEN America, the excellent American poet Jeffrey Yang (who earlier this year won the PEN/Osterweil Award for Poetry) translated four of them. Liu dedicated each one to his wife, Xia. Judging from the dates, most (and perhaps all) of the poems appear to have been composed during his three years of “reeducation.” Paul Auster read the poems at our launch party, and later recorded his readings. Here is the first of the poems that he read:

One Letter Is Enough

for Xia

one letter is enough
for me to transcend and face
you to speak

as the wind blows past
the night
uses its own blood
to write a secret verse
that reminds me each
word is the last word

the ice in your body
melts into a myth of fire
in the eyes of the executioner
fury turns to stone

two sets of iron rails
unexpectedly overlap
moths flap toward lamp
light, an eternal sign
that traces your shadow

8. 1. 2000

You can both read and listen to all the poems here. The U.S. Congress, by the way, passed a resolution calling for Liu’s release just a few weeks ago. You can sign a petition calling for his release here, and you can hear, and watch, Liu himself talking about democracy and free expression here.

Iran reading this Saturday + links

This Saturday, July 11, from 2 to 5 pm, the Bowery Poetry Club will host a free event entitled “Literatures of Resistance: An Afternoon in Solidarity with the Iranian People.” Among the readers are PEN Award-winner Dalia Sofer and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, whose writing appears in PEN America 10: Fear Itself.

The following Wednesday, as previously mentioned, PEN is co-sponsoring a forum on Iran with The New York Review of Books and the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center.

The translators’ roundtable over at The Observer Translation Project has been fairly widely noted; also worth reading there is the “Letter from Chişinău,” by Moldovan journalist Leo Butnaru, about the relationship between literature and politics -- and, more specifically, the current political situation in Moldova.

And speaking of writers and politics: Liu Xiaobo was formally arrested on June 23 and charged with “inciting subversion of state power.” PEN considers this arrest “transparently abusive” and “a deeply disappointing and anachronistic denial of Liu’s right to freedom of expression under Chinese and international law.” Liu Xiaobo is one of the authors of Charter 08, calling for democratic reform in China; you can sign a petition to free him here.

And lastly, a plea for the theremin, the musical instrument that inspired Petr Zelenka’s play, which itself is about -- among other things -- the arts under communism. Part of the play appeared in PEN America 8: Making Histories, and was read, on one occasion, by Edward Albee and Sarah Ruhl.

Twenty years since Tiananmen

The Tiananmen Square Massacre -- in which pro-democracy dissidents were forcibly removed from a public square in Beijing after several weeks of peaceful protest -- took place on June 4, 1989. A number of websites are commemorating the anniversary.

Three Percent has posted part of the prison memoir of Liao Yiwu, who composed a famous poem, “Massacre,” condemning the government’s actions. (Translated excerpts of the poem are included in this piece by Bill Marx, written for PRI's “The World.”) He distributed the poem underground and was arrested.

Liao’s memoir was translated by Wen Huang (the recipient of a grant from the PEN Translation Fund), who also translated Liao's amazing, Studs Terkel-inspired book, The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories of China from the Bottom Up, which has recently come out in paperback. Portions of The Corpse Walker appeared in The Paris Review, which has also posted the speech Liao planned to deliver at a gathering in 2007 of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, accepting their Freedom to Write Award. He was detained en route; another award recipient and one of the event's organizers were placed under house arrest. The event was canceled.

Wen Huang has also translated Liao’s interview with Wu Wenjian -- a painter who, as a nineteen-year-old, denounced the violence of June 4, and then served seven years in prison -- and an excerpt from the prison memoir of Wang Dan, another student protester arrested once after the Tiananmen Square protests and again in 1995 for “conspiring to overthrow the Communist Party.” Those translations are both available at Words Without Borders.

Wang Dan is quoted in this report from The New York Times about the surrender yesterday of Wu’er Kaixi, a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests, after two decades in exile. “His action is kind of an expression of anger and protest,” Wang Dan says. “Maybe this is his only way to return to China. For all of us, this is the only way.”

The New Republic has collected some of their reporting both from 1989 and from the lead-up to the Summer Olympics in Beijing, when they compiled profiles of Chinese dissidents. That was also when PEN launched its China Campaign, which is ongoing, and which you can read about here. You can sign the petition to free Liu Xiaobo, co-author of a manifesto calling for greater freedoms and democracy in China, here.

And you can see some amazing photos from the gathering in Tiananmen here.

Update: Hua Hsu, blogging for The Atlantic Monthly, notes the closing of blogs and the disbarring of lawyers just in time for the anniversary -- and also links to this alternate history in which the democracy movement of 1989 prevails.

Benefit on Tuesday, and other news

A reminder: André Aciman, Edward Albee, Anthony Appiah, Ron Chernow, Lydia Davis, Deborah Eisenberg, Nathan Englander, Francine Prose, Sarah Ruhl, and others will be at Cooper Union this Tuesday at 7 p.m. Readings from PEN America will be followed by a reception. We'd love to see you there.

Tickets here, full info here.

If you have not already signed the petition to free Liu Xiaobo -- prominent dissident writer and former president and current board member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, who has been detained since December -- please consider doing so.

Margaret Atwood, a Vice President of International PEN, has pulled out of an international book festival in Dubai, after the festival director cancelled the formal launch there of The Gulf Between Us, "a romantic comedy by the English writer Geraldine Bedell which is set in a fictional Gulf emirate." The book features a gay relationship, and the festival director believes it "could offend certain cultural sensitivities."

The Best Translated Book Awards have been announced. Tranquility by Attila Bartis, translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein and published by Archipelago Books, won the fiction award, and the nod in poetry went to the wonderfully titled For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide, translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu and published by New Directions.

Also at the Open Letter blog, Chad Post notes this story, via Language Log, about the 20-year prison sentences given to two men in Kabul for publishing a translation of the Quran in an Afghan language without including the original Arabic verses. The owner of the print shop that published the book received 15 months in months in prison, which he has already served, reduced from an original five-year sentence.

Update: Jane Ciabattari, PEN member and NBCC president, talks with M Mark, the editor of PEN America, here, on the occasion of the benefit and the awarding of the NBCC's Sandrof award for lifetime achievement to PEN American Center.

Monday morning news

From The New York Times:

President Obama’s 18-minute Inaugural Address on Tuesday was generally lauded by Americans for its candor and conviction. But the Chinese Communist Party apparently thought the new American president’s gilded words were a little too direct.

China Central Television, or CCTV, the main state-run network, broadcast the address live until the moment Mr. Obama mentioned “communism” in a line about the defeat of ideologies considered anathema to Americans. After the translator said “communism” in Chinese, the audio faded out even as Mr. Obama’s lips continued to move.

That same day, Edward Albee, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, and many other writers from around the world signed a letter calling for the release of Liu Xiaobo, a "prominent dissident writer, former President and current Board member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, who has been detained since December 8, 2008 for signing Charter 08, a declaration calling for political reforms and human rights. Liu Xiaobo is being held under Residential Surveillance, a form of pre-trial detention, at an undisclosed location in Beijing, and no charges against him have been made known."


Meanwhile, Amitava Kumar shares a less serious letter (pictured right; click image to enlarge), this one written by a very young Fidel Castro to FDR: "President of the United States, If you like, give me a ten dollar bill green American..." Also see the latest issue of Politics and Culture, made up of letters to Obama from academics, and Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country: Kids' Letters to President Obama, published by McSweeney's and 826 National (excerpts here).

And lastly, many thanks to the National Book Critics Circle, which has awarded PEN American Center the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award. (They also just announced the finalists for the 2008 NBCC Awards, a group that includes recent PEN America contributors Aleksandar Hemon and Marilynne Robinson.)

PEN calls for release of Chinese dissident

The New York Times is reporting on the calls from PEN and others urging the Chinese government to release Liu Xiaobo, pictured left, “a 53-year-old literary critic who has directed the Independent Chinese PEN Center, a group of writers who advocate for broader free speech." He "was taken by security officers from his home on the night of Dec. 8 and has not been heard from since.”

More than 160 prominent writers, scholars and human rights advocates outside mainland China have signed an open letter to President Hu Jintao asking him to release.... Liu Xiaobo—one of the driving forces behind a bold manifesto demanding democratic reforms that has received worldwide attention.

Among the writers signing the letter are three Nobel laureates in literature—the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney and Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian novelist—as well as other writers who regularly champion freedom of expression, including the Italian novelist Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie.

You can read the letter here, and you can use this template provided by PEN to send your own letter to the Chinese president.

You can also now listen to the "Voices Against Torture" event from last week, and read writings on the subject from panelists Scott Horton, Elisa Massimino, Anouar Benmalek, and Jane Mayer.

Albee, Banks, Hagedorn et al

A formal announcement for PEN's August 7 event, "Bringing down the Great Firewall: Silenced Writers Speak on the Eve of the Olympics," is now online. That Thursday night, at the New School's Tischman Auditorium (66 W. 12th St.), at 7 pm, PEN will honor the more than 40 writers and journalists currently being held in Chinese prisons for exercising their right to freedom of expression.

Edward Albee, Russell Banks, Barbara Goldsmith, Jessica Hagedorn, Rick Moody, Martha Southgate, Francine Prose, and others will read statements written by leading Chinese writers including Ma Jian and Xiaolu Guo, along with new and previously untranslated statements and writings by several of the writers currently imprisoned in China.

The event was put together with the Independent Chinese PEN Center. If you'll be in New York, please come and "hear the voices the Chinese government doesn’t want you to hear."


PS. PEN member Jess Row wrote a shrewd and intriguing review of Ma Jian's novel Beijing Coma for last Sunday's New York Times Book Review. The book describes in great detail the 1989 student uprising in Tiananmen Square, and it is "not only an extraordinarily effective novel," Row says, "but also an important political statement, appearing as it does immediately before the 2008 Olympics and a year before the 20th anniversary of the June 4 massacre."

The Great Firewall

As you may have heard, PEN centers in the US, Canada, and China have come together to investigate the state of free expression in China, and have published their findings in a report: "Failing to Deliver: An Olympic-Year Report Card on Free Expression in China." PEN American Center is now following the cases of 51 writers in China, 44 of whom are currently incarcerated.

In order to raise awareness of the matter, PEN will be hosting an event on August 7 called “Breaking Down the Great Firewall: Silenced Writers Speak on the Eve of the Olympics,” which will feature new and previously untranslated statements and writings by several of these jailed writers, as well as other leading dissidents and members of the Independent Chinese PEN Center. We need help translating 10-12 pieces of writing, averaging 3-6 pages in length, for the event. These pieces include thoughts on the current state of free expression, experiences in prison and writing under the Great Firewall, and other statements by prominent writers. Translators are welcome to work anoymously, if that is their preference.

If you're interested, please contact Andrew Proctor, the Membership Director of PEN American Center, at aproctor@pen.org or 212 334 1660 × 101.

The image above is taken from a striking essay by Jed Perl over at The New Republic. Perl argues "that the global art world's burgeoning love affair with Mao and the Cultural Revolution makes a very neat fit with the current Chinese regime's efforts to sell itself as the authoritarian power that everybody can learn to love," and labels this convergence "a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that Mao unleashed on his country in 1966."

Poem by Chinese dissident stalks Olympic torch; Billy Collins passes it on

Today, the International PEN Poem Relay, following the path of the Olympic torch, hits the US, with Billy Collins reciting the poem “June” by Shi Tao, translated into English by Chip Rolley, from PEN Sydney.

My whole life

Will never get past “June”
June, when my heart died
When my poetry died
When my lover
Died in romance’s pool of blood

June, the scorching sun burns open my skin
Revealing the true nature of my wound
June, the fish swims out of the blood-red sea
Toward another place to hibernate
June, the earth shifts, the rivers fall silent
Piled up letters unable to be delivered to the dead

Here is the story of Shi Tao and “June”:

Shi Tao is a Chinese journalist, poet and PEN member, serving 10 years in prison on the charge of “revealing state secrets abroad.” In April 2004, Shi Tao (Shi is his family name) attended an editorial meeting of the Contemporary Commerce News, where he worked, and where a document was read out from the Office of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party warning the media on their reportage during the upcoming 15th anniversary of the June 4 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests and Beijing massacre. Using a Yahoo! Email account and another name, Shi Tao sent notes he took of this document, to overseas pro-democracy websites that publish news and information from China. His notes were published on Demoracy Net, Democracy Forum and others. He was convicted and sentenced for that email. According to court documents, Yahoo! (Hong Kong) Holdings Ltd provided the Chinese authorities with Shi Tao's identity. Shi Tao wrote the poem “June,” a meditation on the 1989 protests and massacre, less than two months after he sent that fateful email - on June 9, 2004.

You can follow the path of the poem here, and read more about the relay here and here. And here is the press release from PEN American Center.

Update: The New York Times has a good write-up of the torch's bizarre path through San Francisco today: “The torch was lit at a park outside at AT&T Park at about 1:17 p.m. Pacific time, briefly held aloft by Chinese Olympic officials and promptly taken into a waterfront warehouse, where it stayed for a half-an-hour as confusion spread crowds along the oft-changing relay route.” Apparently the Olympic officials were dodging the protests, so they could film the torch's travels with minimum embarrassment. As Jason Zengerle writes, over at The New Republic: “the torch relay is pure propoganda, both for the benighted International Olympic Committee and for the Chinese government. There's no reason that the U.S. has to be a party to it.”

Sign the China petition

Amitava Kumar has posted Francine Prose's letter to PEN members concerning the China campaign over on his blog:

As part of our We Are Ready for Freedom of Expression campaign, PEN American Center will be delivering a petition to the Chinese Consulate in New York on April 30, 2008-- 100 days before the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremonies-- requesting the release of our jailed colleagues and seeking an end to internet censorship and other restrictions on freedom of expression in China...

If you have not already done so, please take a moment right now to sign this petition: www.pen.org/chinapetition

Your efforts will make a difference. Since the launch of this campaign on December 10, 2007, four writers and journalists have been released from Chinese prisons.

More information here, and also in these earlier posts about the campaign.