Knowing Is a Kind of Pain: An Interview with Vaddey Ratner

Vaddey Ratner on memory, narrative history, and storytelling as a means of survival.

—Interviews

11 min read

You Are Now Holding the Embers With Your Bare Hands

Syrian writer Rosa Yassin Hassan on exile. Translated by Nawara Mahfoud.

—Essays | Long reads

34 min read

Painful Encounters with Bureaucracy

Hanna Komar on visas, Belarus, and sunsets on Peckham Rye.

—Essays

6 min read

The Hotel

Zainab Akhlaqi, after leaving Afghanistan. Translated by Zubair Popalzai.

—Essays

18 min read

I Did Not Make That Decision Out of Bravery

Awet Fissehaye responds to the proposed 'Illegal Migration Bill'.

—Essays | Illegal Migration Bill (x Counterpoints Arts)

16 min read

Written on the Bodies: The Language of the Hostile Environment

Rogelio Braga on the politicisation of black and brown migrant bodies and the intersections of political persecutions and the UK's hostile environment.

—Essays

10 min read

Shuddhashar at 30: An Interview with Tutul

Bangladeshi publisher Tutul – with whom Margaret Atwood shared her 2016 PEN Pinter Prize – discusses exile, free thinking, and thirty years of the magazine and publisher Shuddhashar.

—Interviews

6 min read

Exils

To close our series on exile with the British Museum and Edmund de Waal, Scholastique Mukasonga writes a personal experience of exile as a Rwandan Tutsi

—PEN Transmissions x British Museum x Edmund de Waal

9 min read

Remembering Partition

For our series on exile with the British Museum and Edmund de Waal, Kavita Puri writes on partition, memory and exile.

—PEN Transmissions x British Museum x Edmund de Waal

9 min read

How Do I Reconcile these Irreconcilable Things?

For our series on exile with the British Museum and Edmund de Waal, Taqralik Partridge writes on Scotland, Canada, and language loss

—PEN Transmissions x British Museum x Edmund de Waal

10 min read

This Library Is Not an Artwork: An Interview with Edmund de Waal

To open our series with the British Museum and Edmund de Waal, Edmund speaks to us about his library of exile

—PEN Transmissions x British Museum x Edmund de Waal

9 min read

With this Novel, I Return: An Interview with Rafik Schami

Syrian-German novelist Rafik Schami discusses liberty, storytelling, language and exile.

—Interviews

7 min read

After apocalypse, exile

Haile Bizen was a poet, a writer, a government employee in Eritrea. Then, from one day to the next, he was a political refugee.

—Archive

6 min read