PEN American Center will be in Geneva next week to press our concerns about free expression in Mexico, China, and Nigeria. All three countries come under scrutiny this month as part of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review process, which examines the human rights record of each UN member country every four years. Now in its sixth year, the UPR has become an vital mechanism for documenting and discouraging human rights violations around the world, and an important forum for PEN to focus international attention on countries where writers and journalists are especially at risk. Very high on that list is Mexico, where forty-six journalists have been killed since 2006. PEN American Center has been protesting the violence against journalists in Mexico for more than a decade, and in 2012 we joined an international delegation to call for the federalization of crimes against journalists—crimes which previously went unsolved because they fell under state jurisdiction. The Senate voted to federalize the crimes, but the Mexican government has been slow to assert its new authority to investigate and prosecute attacks, as Freedom to Write director Larry Siems noted after a follow-up visit to Mexico earlier this year.
Tade Ipadeola has won the 2013 Nigeria Prize for Literature for his book of poetry, The Sahara Testaments. The Prize is the biggest in Africa and Ipadeola will be taking home a whopping $100 000 USD.
He was shortlisted along with Nnadi Amu (Through the Window of a Sandcastle) and Ogochukwu Promise (Wild Letters) from a longlist of eleven titles.
Chika Unigwe took home the prize last year for her novel On Black Sisters Street.
Ipadeola is the President of PEN Nigeria Centre and published two poetry collections, A Time of Signs and The Rain Fardel, prior to writing The Sahara Testaments.
For our second-annual Banned Books Celebration, PEN America once again reached out to PEN members, supporters, and staff—writers and editors of all backgrounds and genres—who sent us their reflections on the banned books that matter most to them. Today’s piece comes from PEN’s own Antonio Aiello, Website Editor. To find out more about how you can get involved with Banned Books Month, click here.
Warning: What you are about to read contains profanity, vile, morbid, and anti-parent material, suggestive illustrations, subliminal messages that glorify Satan, suicide, cannibalism, disrespect for truth and legitimate authority, and celebrates the occult. Also be warned that there are no penises named Ralph in this post, no gay penguins, no bondage, rape, or incest, no racial slurs, and no wizards or vampires.
Prove it. Take a boy who left the forest and became
evidence. Victor, until 12, knew only the sounds of rain on
leaves, on rock, on dirt—no voices down the hall. No voice
in the head. He entered the languaged world late and
learned: to be pleasant, to remember remembering, and two
phrases.
The drawing wants to lay down in lines the complex of perception. What if we all just looked for three hours? Didn’t move a pencil. Just became, each one of us, a reservoir of regard. And then, we return to the street, not with pencils, but with our hands empty, open, ready, our—our what?—I don’t want to name it—vow—whatever it is that overflows—overflowing.
Warning: What you are about to read contains profanity, vile, morbid, and anti-parent material, suggestive illustrations, subliminal messages that glorify Satan, suicide, cannibalism, disrespect for truth and legitimate authority, and celebrates the occult.
From the Judges’ Citation: “Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein have taken the tagline of Mother Jones—“Smart, Fearless, Journalism”—and made it not only a mission statement but a challenge, a challenge that any editor or writer committed to scrupulous reporting and compelling storytelling could do well to learn from.”
—2013 Judges Jin Auh, Robin Desser, and Anna Holmes.
From the Judges’ Citation: “White demonstrates a superb flair for comic timing and a seemingly unbounded linguistic inventiveness that by turns leaves us agog with admiration and has us convulsed in laughter. This is a translator’s translation—one to demonstrate just how very agile, resourceful and utterly delectable the best translators can be. White has done us an immeasurable service in bringing into English Thelen’s forgotten masterpiece, and in doing so with such consummate and delicious mastery.”
—2013 Judges Margaret Carson, Bill Johnston, and Alex Zucker
“What the recent leaks tell us is not just that the government is trying to restrict freedom of expression,” Larry Siems, the director of the Freedom to Write Programme at the PEN American Center, an advocacy group advancing free expression, told IPS. “They’re telling us that our government has been engaging in activities that run counter to our laws and to international humanitarian law.”
