NADIA SAEED: Thank you all for speaking with me today; I know parts of the conversation are going to be difficult, so I want to start off with a light-hearted question: What are your earliest memories of reading as a child, and in what way did they motivate you to start writing for children in particular?

CANDY GOURLAY: I grew up in the Philippines, in the 1960s and 70s. There were very few bookstores then and they were all English-language bookstores. We got our books via door-to-door salesmen who came and sold us digests, anthologies and collections of contemporary publishing in the Western world. Those books were such a magical thing for me – it was like a door to the outside world. When you live in poverty, in a poor third-world country under martial law, where there was a lot of violence, Narnia, Enid Blyton, brownies and fairies were truly magical. They were the good place. Whereas the Philippines seemed a bad place, it was hot and sticky, nobody had money or could travel, and bad things happened there. So, I had a kind of screwed up idea of the world because of those books, in a way, but at the same time, it was an escape.

ALOM SHAHA: Similarly to Candy, I grew up in what would be described as deprived or disadvantaged circumstances. There’s that cliche of ‘books made me’, but books really did show me how to be in the world and were the substitute for the adults in my life.  Having said that, one of my clearest memories of reading was with my father: he and I didn’t get on; however, he did introduce me to reading. Like most Bangladeshi immigrants where I lived, we didn’t have any books in the house. My father was one of the few Bangladeshis on the estate who could read and write. I remember him bringing home some kind of ABC book when I was very young, before primary school, and teaching me. I learned to read before I started school and that was down to him – it’s the one thing I remain grateful to him for. Reading and literature were so central to my happiness as a child and have continued to be central to my life. People who are non-readers perhaps don’t understand the extent to which, for people like me, reading is a refuge, something that keeps us safe in a way. For me, that safety was provided by books, by fictional characters, by imaginary worlds.

DANIELLE JAWANDO: I grew up in Manchester on a very working-class estate. I didn’t know any writers, but one thing that my mum made sure to do at an early age was to give me books. There’s a joy in reading, especially when you’re growing up and you feel quite different, like you haven’t quite found your place in the world yet. I feel like books are a safe space, they helped me to feel like I belonged. They played a crucial role in my teenage years when I was having a really difficult time at school. Books were the thing that consistently got me through, and I’d say they saved my life in a way. I remember the first book that I read that had a mixed-race character in it. It was Malorie Blackman’s Thief! I always say that that book had the most instrumental impact on my life because, for the first time, I felt like I mattered enough to be in a story, and that’s stayed with me, all these years later.

HIBA NOOR KHAN: For me, it’s a little bit different. I’m a second-generation British Pakistani. When my maternal grandfather came to the UK, he found a deep passion for Urdu and Farsi literature, so he filled my mum’s childhood home with books. She inherited that obsession, and so I was very fortunate to grow up with books in the house. There was a strong emphasis on reading and I think my earliest memory would be climbing a tree near my auntie’s house; it had a V-shaped branch in the middle, and I used to climb up and sit there. I always had tangerines with me, and I used to read for hours. Similar to Danielle, I also experienced bullying at quite a young age, and reading became this haven, this escape, and a space to step away from what was going on.

NS: The Excluded Voices report from October 2025, which was published by the Inclusive Books for Children, found that only 5.9% of books published in the UK in the last three years featured marginalised main characters, and only half of those were created by authors or illustrators from those groups. This opens a complex conversation about own voices and who gets to write whose stories. I wanted to unpack whether it matters who is telling the story, so long as minoritised stories are being platformed?

AS: I think it’s such a thorny topic, and I don’t know how we disentangle the right of writers to tell whatever stories they want from the fact that there are oppressed and disadvantaged minorities who don’t have a voice in publishing. So, there’s a part of me that thinks anyone should be able to write any story. I’ve read great literature from many different perspectives, but I think untangling the morality of it all is difficult. I think it would all be far easier if people like me felt that the publishing industry really took diversity, equality, and inclusion seriously, and not just tokenistically.

CG: The tricky thing is that fiction is about making things up, and imagining yourself into another person, in another world. But this of course depends on your imagination, on your curiosity crossing any and all boundaries. The problem, to some extent, is not about the creator. The problem is about the publishing industry, about who has the power and the opportunity to tell a story. For those of us who write books, it’s just about good writing. A good writer will question their right to write any story; it’s something I do with every novel. My book, Wild Song, is about indigenous people in the Philippines, a people that I am not a member of. I struggled with this over the years it took me to write Wild Song. Do I really have the right to tell this story I care so much about? I discussed the dilemma with the indigenous people themselves, and I spent years and years researching. But writing the book, I learned that their story was my story, that what happened to them happened to all Filipinos. It was shared history, and I had every right to tell the story. But I didn’t dare write it without doing the work that needed to be done.

DJ: As authors of colour, there is still so much erasure within publishing; from the moment our work is acquired to how it is marketed, reviewed, and questioned. That is why it is important that marginalised authors are given the space and agency to tell their own stories. The problem arises when representation becomes tokenistic, particularly when white authors write underrepresented characters without necessarily engaging with the lived realities and complexities of race, culture, or identity. The same can be said of class. Race and class are not isolated experiences, and for many marginalised writers, they intersect in ways that cannot be reduced to labels.

Writers should be able to write outside of their own experiences, as long as they approach those stories with research and care. But there is still a question of who is given the space to tell those stories within publishing. When white authors write about marginalised characters, their work can sometimes be seen as more acceptable or palatable, while writers of colour are still expected to justify the authenticity of their own experiences. For me, the issue is not simply about who has the right to write a story, but why some voices continue to be given more space than others, particularly when marginalised writers are still fighting to be heard.

AS: I think it’s very easy to focus on just race and gender, but one of the things that has irritated me most is reading works by privileged, middle-class writers, writing about poverty; it seems so deeply inauthentic to me. I grew up in poverty, and it really bothers me when people get the details of what it’s like to be poor, or to be growing up poor, wrong. Obviously, that’s something that could be addressed with research, but I think authenticity, or lack of it, is something that does bother us as readers when we spot it.

HK: I think something that I’ve been irritated by over the last few years especially, as Danielle mentioned, is when elements of identity are used but it’s clear that there’s nothing else to it. It does matter who is telling the story, but there’s the potential to be more damaging than beneficial when things aren’t aligned because, like we’ve all said, the nuance, the complexity, the richness that is the reality of each layer of each dimension of any identity needs to be preserved. It’s impossible to say what is enough or what is a sufficient affinity, or connection, or lived experience, because it’s going to vary. Sincerity is important, but it is not enough.

I experienced this when I was writing my novel about the partition of India. I am South Asian, but I’m British South Asian and I’m Muslim, but I also wrote from Hindu and Sikh perspectives. I was waking up in the middle of the night, constantly questioning myself. I think something that is important is your own willingness to question yourself, to interrogate what you think is sufficient along the way. It’s also something that I grappled with when I was writing Safiyyah’s War. I’m living in this century; I’m not living in World War Two Paris. I physically cannot, and I’m also not French Algerian, so I was questioning if it was okay for me to write this character. The conclusion that I came to was that the primary defining identity element here is being Muslim, which is a shared experience between myself and the character. I did some meaningful research and tried to do justice to all parts of the character’s identity. Having relational respect, as well as real-life connection is important. Ultimately, it’s about the power dynamics and the context into which we’re sending our words, and it’s simultaneously the most important and frustrating thing.

CG: I think in an ideal world, everyone would be writing the voices of anybody, because we don’t want to police people’s imagination. There will be good books, and there will be bad books. But writers of colour live in a historical reality where there has been very little representation in world literature of voices like ours. Unlike white writers whose world is so well represented. They have the freedom to fail; it’s okay to write a bad book. But for us, it’s high stakes and high scrutiny. We’ve got to write really good books. Will my novel be the only Filipino novel published this year in the UK? When my first book came out, I suddenly realised it would be the first Filipino book published in the UK. There’s no body of books that allows us to write bad and good books. We’re always competing with ourselves.

NS: A lot of what you’ve all said speaks into another question that I had around being palatable versus self-censorship, and it made me think about the recent controversy with the US children’s laureate’s comments on didacticism in children’s literature and the quality of the books currently being published. I thought a little bit about what this means for writers of colour in particular; this idea of working to the status quo, being called ‘woke’ whilst trying to educate readers about contexts and experiences that aren’t their own. Do you find you’re self-censoring as a writer of colour, particularly when it comes to making your books ‘palatable’ to mass markets?

CG: When writing for children, it is a priority to consider what the age group you’re writing for can endure. When writing a historical setting, you’re aware that there is death and cruelty, and yet you have to be true to the story or you´ll be doing history (which may already have been buried or rewritten) an injustice. In my novel Bone Talk, for example, the indigenous characters are head hunters. I wondered if I should not mention that I didn’t want my readers to see them as savages because they chopped off the heads of their enemies a hundred years ago. I could see that contemporary members of that community felt shame about the practice. In one museum, the only reference to it was hidden in a basement shelf. But then I began to read widely and realised that the practice was not exclusive to so called primitive societies. One of the most famous head hunters in the world is English – Henry VIII!

So, my advice to other authors is do not shirk from these things. Good writing is about finding ways for children to witness these historical realities without experiencing harm.

I am always thinking about how children engage emotionally with the story. Is it too much? How can I make it true and yet adjusted to their age level? For this I learn so much from the historical fiction for young people written by Catherine Johnson, which is always true, always age appropriate.

DJ: I was a teacher before I started writing and I worked with a lot of young people who had been let down and failed by the system and so many institutions. I always write for those young people, and I think it’s so important for them to see themselves represented on the page. I was born in Moss Side in Manchester on a very large council estate. When you look it up, there’s lots of awful things that are written in the headlines about it, but there’s such a sense of community and love there. I guess, when I write and I set my books in places like Moss Side, I try to challenge ideas and narratives around what being from a council estate and being working class means, whilst also bringing in some northern representation, which we don’t really see that much.

When I was writing my latest book, If My Words Had Wings, there was a case going on in Manchester, where ten young black boys were sent to prison for 120 years for messages in a group chat. It felt important for me to write about the Manchester Ten because it’s the reality for so many black and brown boys but it’s often talked about. Hope is important because young people are not just one thing; they have painful experiences, but they’re so brilliant and bright and hopeful, and there’s so much joy that I experience from their resistance. I try not to tie things up neatly in a bow at the end of my stories because all of these issues are systemic, and it’s not up to a particular young person to change that.

AS: We all interpret text depending on our own kind of prejudices and preconceptions. I think there’s a refusal to acknowledge that we don’t just publish the books we want to publish. A lot of children’s picture books are didactic, because that’s what publishers think parents want. People want to buy books that are going to teach their kids something, so I’ve read a lot of books that have been written because a publisher says, ‘oh, can we have a book about Eid?’ Nobody’s going to argue with the fact that we need books out there for children about Eid and Diwali and all sorts of things. What I think is problematic about a book written solely with that kind of mission is that they’re not very fun to read. One of the things that I see as a children’s picture book reviewer, particularly, is that these books were not written for children. The adult writing them thought they were being clever; the adult in the publishing industry who commissioned it thinks it’s beautiful or clever, but it will bring no joy to children. I think sometimes we forget that there are huge numbers of authors who are just writing what they’re told to write, or just writing things that they think will be commercial.

HK: Books and words enabled me to survive and cope with the world. I couldn’t reconcile the cruelty I saw. Fiction can be a blueprint; your brain is going through the experiences that you’re reading about but from a safe distance, like it’s equipping you to deal with life. I’m sort of inhabiting a bit of a liminal, weird space at this point in my writing career, and there’s a lot of paradoxes and contradictions in who I am, what I want to write, and what I’m allowed to write. I really struggle with this idea of the author as a brand. I’m not a brand, I just love words and literature, and I might want to write something that’s funny because it’s funny, or silly because it’s silly. I find it all at odds with reality. I am passionate about socio-politics, and forgotten histories, and cultural and religious erasure, and human rights, and when I want to write something about that, I want to be free to do so. I want to make change when that desire comes.

On the topic of censorship, I found when entering the middle-grade world that I was subconsciously self-censoring. While writing Safiyyah’s War, I was overly worried about including too much about Safiyyah’s religion thanks to a voice in my head that has probably formed across the course of my lifetime as a British Muslim! It was my wonderful editor from Andersen Press, Eloise Wilson, who gently and nurturingly encouraged me to be true to my own voice and what I deeply and intuitively wanted to write, including when it was explicitly relating to religious tradition. Working with her on the text was a very affirming and transformative experience, and I am forever grateful for it, because the focus was on honouring authenticity and truth rather than palatability.

NS: I wanted to explore the responsibility of being a voice for a specific identity but also wanting to write beyond that. In 2020, when the Jhalak Prize’s YA strand was set up and Black Lives Matter propelled a movement for more inclusion in book publishing, it felt like there was a real wave of change, but in recent years there’s been this backsliding in inclusivity. What do you feel has shifted for the better since then, and what has shifted for the worse?

AS: I think, generally, the industry has shifted for the worse, and it relates to what Hiba mentioned about the author as a brand. You have to have a social media presence; you have to have an existing platform before you even get published. I imagine it makes it even harder for people from disadvantaged and minority communities to get published in the first place. I think these are all negatives for every writer, but I think those negatives impact minority writers more. From my experience in publishing, particularly working with aspiring and new writers, it seems very clear to me that the publishing industry is first and foremost a business. There’s this notion that if you have an existing audience, you are a more attractive writer and it actually has nothing to do with the quality of your writing.

In terms of what’s changed for the better, I do think the Jhalak Prize and similar initiatives have helped to establish that writers of colour can write great literature. It shouldn’t need proving, but I think that that is the good that these prizes have done in the world: to introduce the wider world to the idea that good writing can indeed come from anywhere and from people of any background.

I wasn’t writing 20 years ago, but I know of lots of older authors and I think in the past, one could write a book that was perhaps not very successful, or just moderately successful, but you would have an agent and a publisher who believed in you and you would get a chance to write a second, or a third, or a fourth book, and become a mid-list author. Now, a first-time writer will get a deal and an advance of a few grand, and the publisher hopes, by some kind of magic, that the book will sell. When it doesn’t, it’s your fault or the book wasn’t any good, and that’s just not true. I think we live or die by our sales, and that, to me, is an environment in which you cannot expect writers, particularly those writers from minority and disadvantaged backgrounds, to develop.

DJ: Just to echo what Alom said, we shouldn’t have to prove that good writing exists when you’re an author of colour. I think often in publishing, a book from a writer of colour isn’t seen as literary fiction or commercial. It’s categorised as a black book or a book by a particular author no matter what, and even with marketing, if a Black author writes a Black romance book, they don’t pitch it as a romance book, it doesn’t get sent to romance festivals in the same way a white writer’s book would. I think many of the positive shifts have come from prizes like the Jhalak Prize and Diverse Book Awards, who really showcase authors of colour. The response from bookshops and booksellers, who have displays of Jhalak titles up and down the country, is truly amazing.

I feel like in 2020, there was a lot of buying books from Black authors, but no intentional marketing. And now, even more so, they see marginalised voices as a risk. There’s this idea that Black and Brown people just don’t sell, but we’re not given the same creative marketing that white authors are given. We’re not given the same chance to succeed. So, it has felt like it’s taken a huge step back.

HK: I think one good thing from then to now is that there is visibility for writers of colour. Our books are out there on shelves in libraries and in schools. With the passage of time, things have become more about trends and fads – it sort of waxes and wanes and that’s not meaningful. I do feel, against this backdrop, Sunny and the Jhalak Prize are powering through. Having the Jhalak community is a hugely important and powerful thing.

CG: Many years ago, I was speaking at a school which seemed to be made up mostly of very tall and brusque boys. After I’d said a few words, a boy raised his hand and said, ‘you grew up in America didn’t you?’ He followed me around the school after that, insisting that I couldn’t have grown up in the Philippines. I didn’t fit his idea of what Filipinos sounded like. It was uncomfortable being told that I wasn’t who I said I was, but I hope he came away thinking, there’s more than one kind of Filipino. I might speak about my country, my history and my culture, but Filipinos are multitudes; there is no single Filipino voice. People are multitudes. And maybe that’s what we are representing when we go to schools.

What has shifted for the better or worse? I remember when ‘multiculturalism’ in books was the buzz word shot down by David Cameron’s conservative government. Then came BAME. Then came Diversity. The labels make it clear that it’s an ‘us’ and ‘them’ situation. And awareness seems to move in cycles; round and round we go. But face to face with our readers, it’s just stories. And if stories are good enough, they become part of who the reader is. And the more we tell our stories, the smaller those circles will get.

NS: It’s the National Year of Reading, and a recent National Literature survey showed that more than one in three children said that they are picking up books in their spare time, which is an increase on last year. This is incredibly exciting. What are your hopes for the children you write for and what are your hopes, in terms of your writing, when it comes to the next few years.

AS: One of the privileges of being a children’s writer is going into schools and doing author visits and I think, more than the books themselves, it’s those events that are useful for children to imagine themselves as writers. There are very few male picture-book writers, so I think that’s good for boys I meet. I’ve had lots of wonderful experiences going into primary schools and I think, because I am a schoolteacher too, the way I interact with children makes them feel, perhaps, that writing is something they could do.

I didn’t start writing until I was in my late 30s, and I didn’t dare to think of myself as a writer until after I’d had my first book published. I loved reading, but I thought writing was some kind of magic that only extremely talented and brilliant people could do, and that was really ingrained into me, because reading was so important and every book was holy to me. I never imagined I could be a writer, so what I really love about going into schools is showing the children that any one of them can write.

HK: I’d echo Alom on this. For me, without a doubt the most special and meaningful moments are when I’m face to face with young readers. The impact that our writing has on the public is impossible to quantify or measure, but the glimpses and glimmers you sometimes find in those visits are magic. Having kids ask for advice on ‘finishing their novel’ or ‘how to get published’ is just wonderful! I sometimes receive beautiful letters from much older readers – an 81-year-old lady’s note explaining how my book had changed her mind about so many things sits proudly above my desk.

More broadly though, I really want to see real human reading and writing recognised by and for young people as a powerful form of resistance against absurd digitalisation going around us, and as vital tools in preserving mental health, critical thinking, and creativity, all of which are essential to our functioning as a species! This needs to be an urgent pursuit, a widespread movement. 

CG: My hope is that the world will ease the pressures that stop children from reaching for books. The world is a rough place at the moment. I was so inspired by Frank Cottrell Boyce’s final speech as children’s laureate – he showed us how hard it was for many children to access books, and then he introduced us to the people who, via small acts of care, make it possible. We all need to be more like that.

DJ: At the beginning of this year, I was on a panel with one of the young boys who was part of the Manchester Ten trial. His youth worker sent him my book when he was in prison. The main character was getting ready to be released from prison, and he read it whilst his appeal was coming up. He said that, when he saw the main character get released, he had hope that the same would happen to him. That is something that will stay with me forever. He said that he felt like the world thought he was guilty, but reading my book, it made him realise that someone else understood his pain.

When I’m writing, I hope that I make young people feel seen and understood. I won’t be able to do that with every book, but that’s something that I will often think about and try to do. I hope that seeing me and the path I took makes young people realise that being a writer is completely possible for them too.

The post Imagining Yourself into Another Person, in Another World appeared first on English PEN.

Let me start by saying what a great honour this is – one which I have taken some time to register as real. To say that I am moved to have received it is, to say the very least, an understatement.

Sincere thanks to the three judges, Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN, to distinguished creators – playwright and screen writer, Tanika Gupta, and poet and author, Will Harris. Thanks also to Daniel Gorman, Director of English PEN, and to Zoe Sadler and Will Forrester whose guidance has been unfailing. Thanks to Helena Kennedy for her generosity and friendship, and on the issue of human rights, for being way ahead of the times. And finally to our Writer of Courage for all that he does, for being here, and for being there in every sense of the term.

This is not a time to mince words. So, let me begin by saying that I speak here, today, as a woman who is proud to define herself as a dissident Jew. Proud to be ‘dissident’ because, with the rise of autocratic regimes across the globe, the crushing of political protest and freedoms, dissidence feels like the only place to be. Proud to be a ‘Jew’ because there exists a tradition of Jewish history and thought which, over millennia, has made its appeal for equity and justice to be placed at the core of what it means to be Jewish. To cite two powerful Biblical injunctions: ‘Justice, Justice, you shall pursue,’ (Deuteronomy, 16:20), ‘Remember you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus, 22:21, Leviticus, 19:34). For this tradition, the actions of the State of Israel currently being perpetrated against the Palestinians in my name would, I strongly believe, be viewed as anathema.

This prize is named for Harold Pinter. ‘Unflinching,’ to use his own word, he was never one to hold fire in the face of deadly political power. On the occasion of being awarded an honorary degree at the University of Turin in 2002, he listed the political silences that had spread and were continuing to spread across the globe. From the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children deprived by US sanctions of life-saving medicines in Iraq, to the killings, now mostly forgotten, that had unfolded in 1970s Latin America, from Nicaragua, to Guatemala, and El Salvador. But he ended with ‘the desperate plight of the Palestinian people’ as ‘the central factor in world unrest [which] is hardly referred to.’  ‘Central’, the key to ‘world unrest’, ‘desperate’ and ignored. ‘What a misjudgement of the present,’ he concluded, and ‘a misreading of history this is.’

That was close on a quarter-century ago. We can only imagine what he would have had to say now about the genocidal atrocity being inflicted on the Palestinians for whom the spectre of freedom has never been so frail and fades by the day. Pinter was in good company.  On 4 December 1997, in what became one of his most iconic statements, Nelson Mandela had insisted: ‘We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.’ Palestinian self-determination becomes the litmus test for the future of world freedom. In which case, if we look around us now at the debris of the future, it is a test at which the entire world has drastically failed. We now wait to see if Ed Miliband’s House of Commons speech, delivered on 8 September, its principles repeated loudly at the Labour Party Conference, will be the breakthrough moment it so urgently needs to be. Even while, I think I can say with tragic confidence, we already know it will not be enough.

In late May 2025, more than a thousand Israeli academics signed ‘An Urgent Call to the Heads of Academia in Israel,’ urging them ‘to act immediately to mobilise the full weight of Israeli academia to stop the Israeli war in Gaza.’ The signatories continue: ‘We cannot claim that we did not know. We have been silent for too long.’ The institutions of higher education in Israel, must ‘call things what they are – unspeakable actions being done in our own name, with our own hands.’ Note the logic of this argument. If we do not speak out, if we fester inside a willed ignorance, then ‘we’ – which means every single higher academic inside Israel and by implication many more – become guilty, complicit in unspeakable crimes: ‘in our own name, with our own hands’. I don’t think ‘with our own hands’ was intended metaphorically.

One of Pinter’s strongest drives was to strip bare the presiding lies of the time. His Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 2005 opened with views on art and politics he had first penned in 1958. An ugly, violent, expansive regimen of power boasted its ‘civilised’ virtue, at the same time as laying a type of gauze across the world, making it almost impossible for the political reality to be seen. That is why, I think, so many of his plays involve a domestic space, often of misleading banality and calm, where something slowly crawls out of the woodwork, leaving everyone standing exposed as who they truly are. His work lifts the lid on the myth of middle-class conformity, comfort and safety, rampant in the 1950s, shadowed by the encroaching Cold War. This too was the time of the nascent state of Israel, which was founded in 1948 in what Israel describes as the ‘War of Independence’ and Palestinians ‘The Nakba’ or ‘Catastrophe,’ as indeed it turned out to be. It was through this lens that I first saw the world. I was born in 1949, the year that the temporary, cruel and unsteady armistice lines were laid down between Israel, and Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. I think that makes of me a child, a reluctant child, of Israeli statehood as one might say.

Although Pinter contrasts political theatre with the subtleties of creating complex dramatic characters, the overriding principle remains the same. The characters must be given the freedom to go ‘which way they will.’ They must be allowed ‘to breathe their own air.’ His job was not to impose on them a ‘false articulation’, not to force a character ‘to speak where he could not speak’, make him ‘speak in a way he could not speak,’ ‘make him speak in a way he could never speak.’ ‘As if, every time he put pen to paper, he was releasing an entrapped soul. Re-reading his works for today, delving into less familiar terrain, I started to notice more than I had registered before just how far oppression and injustice are his key. Hence, indeed, that first play, The Birthday Party, staged in 1958. For all its celebration – a party endlessly anticipated but never seen on stage – the play ‘collapses’ at the end, to use his words, into ‘a single act of subjugation,’ as the birthday boy is carted off who knows where.

Lady Antonia Fraser will correct me, but it seems to me that the role of theatre in countering injustice becomes more and more explicit. Two short later plays that particularly struck me. Mountain Language of 1988, where a woman, in what seems to be a police state, is barred from the use of her Indigenous tongue. And Ashes to Ashes of 1996, where an abused woman, possibly drowning, narrates the terrors of her life, including the sight of screaming babies being torn from their mothers’ arms, while a man who listens clamps his hand over her mouth and around her throat.’

Of one thing I am sure. Were Pinter with us today, even as the war on Gaza fades from the front pages, in fact the more it does so, he would never have stopped calling out our accountability for Palestine. Just when you allowed yourself to think, if only for a split second, that the situation could surely not get any worse, the rulers of Israel manage yet again to excel themselves. Today, the Israeli government has the blood-soaked temerity to ask Trump to support the illegal, forced displacement of every single Palestinian remaining in Gaza. With deadly precision and barely concealed glee, Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir has specified 250,000 Palestinians to be removed in the first year, followed by the rest of the roughly 2 million remaining over the next six years (though ‘ethnic cleansing,’ let alone ‘genocide,’ never enters the official pronouncements of Israel as state).  In fact Ben-Gvir is on the path to fulfilling a longer-term plan for Palestine, drawn up in 2017 by Bezalel Smotrich, radical settler in charge of the West Bank, before he became Finance Minister. The Palestinians are faced with three options: to live under Jewish supremacy while ceding all national claims; to leave the territory; or, for any who resist, to face deadly suppression by the Israeli military. A capacity massively inflated by Trump’s approval of a $2.8 billion arms sale to Israel a few weeks ago.

Crucially, in today’s plan, not a trace of what once was Gaza will remain. What was Gaza, to which I must add, as many Palestinians continue to insist, what was Gaza and always will be – despite the expulsions, the carnage, the rubble of the city. This is where hope, if only a sliver, takes shape. Something new is being crafted, every time someone lives to see another day, to tell the tale, refuses to give in. ‘Telling the tale’ is of course a crucial part of the story. To echo the world-wide project of PEN who host us this evening in their fight for freedom of expression, we might take just one glaring example of creativity in the face of raw censorship: film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor being threatened with loss of citizenship, and with their lives, for their film, NAZA, which records the voices of 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers, as they describe the policy of precision mass remote killings in the war on Gaza, including targeted civilian casualties. Some express shame, some indifference, others are proud to boast.

Abraham and Szor are artists. Cultural struggle in the name of justice and freedom is their terrain. Which brings us to this evening’s Writer of Courage, with whom I share this prize, a special honour not least as he is the first Palestinian to win this accolade. As well as writing short stories based on his experience, he is playwright, mentor, actor, and director with Ashtar Theatre, which is famous for its prize-winning Gaza Monologues, first staged in 2010, which continue in their repertoire to this day, and have been translated and distributed across the world. Please welcome this year’s Writer of Courage, Ali Abu Yasin.

The Ashtar Theatre describes itself as an art-based framework of justice, an archive, and counter-weight to the threat of erasure and the failings of international law. Ali Abu Yasin has built a network of workshops aimed at strengthening the new generation’s mental health. His plays have been banned, he has been prevented from travel, but he never stops. He lives in the al-Shati refugee camp, one of the largest refugee camps in Gaza. He knows all about perishing and survival. Crying out for justice, he knows what it means not to survive, and yet somehow to survive as he constructs his vision of hell and creativity, drowning and performing, that is his life and the life of his family and everyone inside Gaza today.

Like Pinter, Ali Abu Yasin is a dramatist and storyteller, ‘unflinching’ both. For the rest of our time, I want therefore to pay tribute to the skill and courage of what he writes. Listen to how death comes alive: ‘When you feel that death is storming you, raping you, threatening your existence, imposing on you and your family – the family you have spent your entire life sacrificing for – this is something that no one can bear. I must live, defy death, stay alive … But how do we survive this amount of hellish lava that is thrown at us from the sky.’ Even the sea is ‘no longer what it once was’: a symbol of freedom and play which is now ‘a site of horror.’ How to raise children, how to be a child, in such a world? Parents either want their child ‘to grow rough’ so he will not break, or flexible ‘so the child does not turn into stone.’ ‘Every time I hear a child wishing to die,’ writes another voice from the Gaza monologues, echoing a plaint which stretches across the length and depth of the land, ‘everything in me dies.’ Ali Abu Yasin travels into the core of grief. A mother wanders the camp hallucinating her slaughtered child; another woman, paralysed in the war and something of a cause célèbre in the community, becomes a voluntary mute.

In such conditions, he writes, death is not merely ‘the cessation of physical movement, but an attempt to rob one’s spirit and hope, imposing a life beyond human endurance.’ Note that reference to spirit. According to the 1948 Genocide Convention, for an act of war to qualify as genocide, the intent must be to destroy ‘in whole or part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.’ As far as a I am aware, the Convention does not mention ‘spirit.’ But I think we can fairly say that those who quibble over the wording in an attempt to bypass its meaning clearly have not reckoned with the spirit and mettle of the likes of this year’s Pinter Writer of Courage, Ali Abu Yasin.

Against all odds, he insists that optimism has its place, not as ‘a denial of reality but a conscious stance to confront it.’ In Gaza, he writes, optimism is not ‘an escape from pain, but an energy that urges people to hold on to life … We refuse to be silently erased.’ ‘I am still here and I will continue to keep dreaming.’ Most often, dreaming is cast out of the zone of politics and assigned to the unreal world of imagination. Here, it becomes one of the few remaining places where a viable future might be found.

Ali Abu Yasin never wavers. Writing remains his appointed task. After one of his most disturbing accounts of escaping bombs and snipers in a storm, rain pounding on families fleeing death on the move, he somehow makes it back to his home and sits at his desk in his house, which is still barely standing, miraculously, amid the rubble. He starts to write. His task is to capture such moments before they ‘dissolve’ into the gathering noise. Writing is oxygen – ‘If I don’t write, I suffocate. I write to remember that I’m alive, and to leave a trace for the generations to come.’ He is not alone in questioning whether, when this war surely ends, he will find the courage and strength to call himself human again. ‘We are no longer the same as we were.’ ‘Building a human,’ he writes, ‘is far more difficult than rebuilding a structure.’ ‘I believe that everyone living in Gaza is now different from the rest of the world.’ Try to remember, he pleads, ‘that there may be something called “knowledge”.’ To cite Harold Pinter’s words again: ‘What a misjudgement of the present and a misreading of history,’ for the world to think it could forget or ignore Palestine.

This is writing that bears witness to itself. As if Ali Abu Yasin wants to take, or rather accompany, his readers, actors and co-writers beyond the limit of human endurance, and then stop – almost, right on the brink – when they reach the edge. Or, to put it more simply, he really takes you there: whether you’ve already been there, got out, have barely survived, or whether – to go back to where I began – in person or in heart and mind, you should have been, or should be, there. How to create empathy with a suffering people when the brute conditions they are living under mean there is almost nothing of the human being left?  When one hears the term ‘Writer of Courage,’ what most easily springs to mind is a writer who has been banned, censored, imprisoned. Ali Abu Yasin has been banned. He has watched cultural venues razed to the ground. But in the end what strikes me is what he does, and what he makes us do with, his words. His life and work are testimony and object-lesson in the writing of disaster. If such writing does not merit the title ‘Writer of Courage,’ then I, for one, have no idea what, or who, possibly could.

The post Jacqueline Rose’s PEN Pinter Prize 2026 Speech appeared first on English PEN.

HEATHER MARKS: Hi Jacob, hi Ashley – it’s great to be speaking with you both. As writers at different stages of your careers who have had varied roles within the literature landscape – how do you feel you have changed as writers, and how are you still the writer you were when you started out?

JACOB ROSS: That’s a great question, I was thinking about that last night. I grew up under a dictatorship, in the 1960s and 70s in the Eastern Caribbean, Grenada. And if you know anything about Grenada, you know it was invaded by the Americans, not very dissimilar to what happened to Venezuela recently. That experience was quite seminal in my understanding of society, poverty, and women in society (having grown up in a massive extended family where there were hardly any men), and these themes persist. They haven’t changed in any fundamental way. What has changed for me is that I moved to England, and an examination of the society struck me quite hard. It’s something that Salman Rushdie says – when Britain left the colonies, they didn’t simply leave the colonies, they took the colonies with them. That was his way of explaining the kinds of racism, institutional barriers, and attitudes that we encounter. The whole superstructure was always there, and the colony is still here. So, I still find myself addressing that in my writing and being immensely preoccupied with it.

If there’s been one big change, it’s something I did completely arbitrarily with my book that won the Jhalak Prize. I wasn’t previously interested in crime fiction as a writer; I was interested in it as somebody who reads and enjoys people beating other people in books sometimes. But I was challenged by a student in my class because I made a bold claim that if you understand the structure of novels, you can write in any genre – and so she challenged me to do it. We didn’t have crime fiction in the Caribbean to any large extent, so, I never expected to get any kind of acknowledgement for my involvement in crime fiction. I was always seen, and I’d always seen myself, as a literary writer in the sense that I write the kind of things associated with African Caribbean writing. So, that represented a massive turnaround for me.

HM: I love what you’re saying around the purists getting upset now that you’re writing in this genre, because there’s so much of that around now. Just being writers of colour in any genre, when you bring yourself into it, that upsets them.

JR: Yes, if you are to address any type of English writing, or what people refer to as English writing; be it a form, be it fantasy, crime fiction, whatever it is. If you’re serious, as a writer, you have to look at what it’s telling you, where it’s come from, its tradition, what are the assumptions (and so many of them are still racialised assumptions that you encounter in the writing). You have to ask very hard questions of this form, because it’s not yours. It’s not mine. It’s not even theirs, frankly speaking, because the English and the Europeans claim to have invented the novel, but they didn’t. The Chinese did, in 1610. That, again, is quite controversial, but what I’m getting at is that for me, I cannot, as a writer, simply adopt wholesale the English idea of the novel, or indeed of a short story. It’s a denial of so much. It’s a denial of our own narrative traditions, and the way we tell stories. It’s a denial of the authenticity of our articulations. It’s an acceptance, which I don’t accept, that there is only one narrative tradition in the world and it’s a Eurocentric one. That’s not true.

ASHLEY THORPE: I think there’s a lot of crossovers for me. The difference is I’m very early in my career, so I’ve got two published books out now, and they were back-to-back 2024/25. I am a child of immigrants – my grandparents moved from Jamaica, rather than Grenada, in the 60s. I was born in the late 80s. My parents decided to raise me and my brothers in an area of Nottinghamshire that was outside of the city centre. For whatever reasons, they thought it would be better to have us out of the city, so we grew up in a suburban/semi-rural space, which was incredibly white. And while I had the freedom and the imagination to play, and I still had the connection with my cousins who were in the city centre, we grew up in a space where we encountered a lot of racism, and we weren’t quite equipped for it. So, when I think about my earliest writing, as a child, a lot of my characters were what I was reading, it was all white children. I was never centring myself in a story.

It wasn’t until I was about 8 years old that I found out Malorie Blackman existed and was finally able to see myself in books. But in the books that I was reading often, especially in the fantasy genre, I would never see characters like me, so that’s what I would write. As an adult now, I’ve maintained the imagination and continued to write, but the big difference is making sure that I’m centring characters of colour. I write for the middle grade space, but the thing is, I’m also writing for myself as an adult so I can pass on a lot of the things that I’ve learned, and wisdom I think I’ve gained in my lifetime. It’s also to make sure there is a mirror for kids, who, like me, enjoy fantasy stories and letting their imaginations run wild, but are not able to see themselves. So that’s why I specifically centre Black children in all my fantasy stories. Also, similarly to what Jacob was saying about the Eurocentric-ness of writing here – the fantasy genre is terrible for that. It takes a lot to try and break down certain boundaries in that sense, especially in a demographic where it’s parents that buy books, not the kids. People bring their biases to that as well, so it is harder to have Black kids on the cover of a book in Waterstones. People will make their assumptions, and they’ll go for what they see as safe, and often that safeness is not black characters.

It was so imperative that I wrote about what I really wanted to see in the literary space. That kids were deserving of heroes in fantastical spaces, not just in ‘urban’ situations or whatever the industry likes to call them. It was important to me because I didn’t really have that, and I want kids to have that now.

My first book, The Boy to Beat the Gods, was a fantastical version of pre-colonial Nigeria, and it delved into the lore of the Orishas – for some publishers, this would be seen as a risk, really. My second book, Spirit Warriors, is a fantastical version of a Jamaica where Maroons fought off the British with magic. Again, a big risk, and I don’t think it would have sold if I had gone with that as my first book. My writing is really this fine balance of putting things out there that I know kids are going to enjoy with adventure and action, with real histories and mythologies hidden in them. Hopefully, kids will be so enthralled with the story that they’ll want to go off and study about these things themselves as well.

I’m glad I’ve got published work now as a late 30-something, rather than in my early 20s because I feel like I’m a more rounded person, and I think that gives the writing a lot more of an emotional core.

JR: Ashley, I have two children who were born in this country. They’re adults now, and I’ll tell you this – when they were growing up, I wish there had been writers like you writing about characters with which my children could have identified. It’s one of the great problems that parents had, especially those of us raising children in the 80s and 90s, had: trying to locate books for our children where they see themselves on the page. I’m not saying this in any political way at all. In a way, it’s telling them, ‘You don’t matter,’ or it’s telling them, ‘You’re not there, you don’t exist.’

That’s why writers like yourself are so important. You’re strategic and you represent a very important cultural and psychological intervention. And, it is political in that sense, not because you are being political, but because for these generations in minoritised groups in this society, you’re giving them a sense of worth, a sense of value. A lot of how we perceive ourselves is to do with the stories we are told. Stories represent the cement of civilisation. We all tell stories, even if it’s a newscast, even if it’s a debate; that’s a narrative, it’s a story. So, I do recognise, and you don’t have to necessarily accept this, but I recognise the central strategic aim of writers like yourself.

HM: It’s interesting what you say around risk Ashley, because I was thinking about how writers of colour are seen as risky in publishing. I’ve been writing from a very young age and I’m now in my early 30s. I think of some of the young writers who get scooped up by a publisher who wants to have the new, hot, young thing that’s on social media – that person just gets thrust into the industry without having been able to get a sense of what’s genuine and what’s BS. Can you talk to me about how knowing yourself more, means that being published later works for you?

AT: I think I would describe myself as something of a late bloomer, certainly in terms of full confidence. But coming into my 30s, I would say it has been my finest decade. It has been the point where experience has met a level of self-assurance.  I feel like I’ve just been better placed with my values at this point of life to tell the stories I want and write the books I want to write. With a bit more self-assuredness and a bit more willingness to make sure there are no compromises with certain things. I’ve been very lucky with my publisher and my editor especially, in that they’ve really loved the stories I’ve written and believed wholeheartedly in me and my ability.

My thing is just to write the stories that I 100% believe in and I think need to be in the world, and then I’ll fight my darndest to make sure it gets the coverage and the traction it deserves. Thankfully, the awards seasons have backed up my belief, and that’s helped massively.

HM: Even as we have ideas for stories and we write them, and pitch them to agents and publishers, suddenly we’re met by these forces outside of us: the market analysis, the trend forecast – the way things are in trade publishing. For you as a writer of colour writing something speculative about the afterlife of slavery or about African mythology, those outside forces have an impact on how your book is shared, if it’s shared at all.

Jacob – how do you keep a level head on this axis of writing the story you want, versus it getting published?

JR: In my view, we’re talking here about the dynamic between authenticity and conformity. The only tranche of writers who have to do that kind of delicate negotiation are writers coming from minoritised cultural spaces. Your average mainstream white writer doesn’t have to worry about representation on the page, and they can get as fantastical as they want. Nobody questions that. There are two things which I have understood after working for around 40 years in the publishing industry as an editor, as a journalist, and so on. One is that the British reading public is far ahead of the publisher’s understanding of what they are prepared to read and consume. I have always thought that. The idea of the marketing avatar that they have is female, probably has disposable income, middle aged, lives somewhere out in the suburbs. I have a lot of colleagues who are very prominent writers in this country, and we’ve all had the experience of being pushed to integrate within our work a certain kind of stereotype that they have of our characters. They cannot, and they wouldn’t, do it with me, but if you were to take my last book, the one that won the Jhalak Prize, and follow the logic of our understanding of what’s happening in the publishing industry, that book should have never have actually succeeded. It should have failed, for the simple reason that my characters are all black. But what the Jhalak Prize did which was a game changer for me and for that book, was to flag it as a book that people have read, and people have judged to be very good regardless of the difference. So, a lot of people from all kinds of spaces began to read the book, and the feedback was fascinating. For me what was interesting about that was the public – the one that the publishers and the marketing people do not see as they are – were prepared to read a book completely out of the containers that they were placed in. These readers were much more open-minded than the publishers gave them credit for.

So that reticence that I get from the mainstream publishers, is a very interesting one. The people who run that particular industry – they’re all middle class. Many of them have had a certain kind of education, they have a certain kind of reading taste, they have a certain kind of understanding of literature, and they bring that to bear on the books coming from a completely different reality. They judge them using those filters. That’s my view, personally. I’d rather not be published than to conform to certain kinds of dictates from publishers. There are certain kinds of stereotypes I’m not going to integrate in my work, because it’s a betrayal of the people I know. We all have dignity, we all aspire for our children, we all have ambition, we feel hurt, we feel pain, we fall in love. So, who dares tell me that it’s improbable that my characters can feel love, or can have certain kinds of relationships, and have a certain quality of intelligence.

The second thing is that in a hundred years’ time, when a black child (in the broad political sense) looks back, they can see how minoritised people like us lived. They can see how we thought, our intellectual activity, the intellectual history of the people from whom they spring, from whom they have grown. That’s really where the danger is, in my view, when writers adopt narratives, adopt characters, adopt writing, because they want to make money (although I do understand that). When you read the book, let’s say in 50 years’ time, you really don’t have a sense of the culture, the society, or the community that the characters have come from. What are the specificities – I’m looking at you, Ashley – that have made you yourself? It’s a conflation of so many encounters and personal histories, and your story is your story, but it’s a story that I will identify with and one that other people would understand. How were you made to feel about your body, about your physicality, about you occupying space?  This is one of the reasons why if anybody dares tell me that I should write a certain kind of book because it is more digestible to a hypothetical audience, I’ll push back. What’s the sense of me writing in the first place? What am I here for? Because for me, I expect every writer to have a sense of mission and to know why they’re writing. I hope it’s not only for money.

AT: My reason for writing is kind of twofold, really. Let’s put aside my own sense of satisfaction and the fact that this is the thing that makes me feel fulfilled. It’s also, as we’ve already mentioned, making sure that children, minority children especially, can conceive themselves in a fantastical space, and not only a contemporary space in literature. The flip side of that is to tap into that universal truth about the human condition, and the fact that if you’re a majority kid, then you also need to have a window into these other worlds so you can learn more about it. At the end of the day, these are still adventure stories about heroic kids, and it just so happens that they are from, in the first book, a fantastical version of an African country, and in the second, a fantastical version of a Caribbean country. There are still so many universal things that they can take from that. And what I’ve learned from my school visits is that kids don’t care. They don’t care that it’s a black kid on the cover. They don’t care that it’s set in Africa and that there are no white characters. They don’t mind about any of that. Adults have that societal barrier, and that also ripples into the wider industry, of course. I think in the last few years, following the Black Lives Matter movement, some really prominent books, like The Hate U Give, became really big over here. People began to look at themselves and look at their lists, and say, oh, we really don’t have anything like this, or any writers of colour really or, oh, we don’t really have any editors as well who are from that space and can then be authentic when they’re working with these writers. That had a big peak in 2020 especially, as a lot of industries had to do a lot of self-reflection. But now, in the children’s literature space, I’ve seen that there has been less risk-taking, and a lot of Black editors I know have either left the industry completely, or are taking a break, or been fired. That, compounded with the fact that we’ve been seeing less energy in terms of tackling this massive gap in representation, gives the feeling that we’re taking steps backwards, which makes it even more important to stay prominent, stay relevant.

My third book is more contemporary, but it’s again talking about things I want to challenge. It takes the idea of an international, relic-seeking adventurer, but it’s putting artifacts back, so it’s restitution. I’m sneaking that message in there by giving kids an adventure, because post-pandemic, literacy levels have dropped quite significantly, as has reading for pleasure.

HM: Now that we are in this climate where there is less risk-taking, there are much tighter lists, some lists where there isn’t even a writer of colour on there – is it easier or more difficult for you to be a writer now 5 years on from 2020, 10 years on since the founding of Jhalak? How has the end of this wave of publishers scrambling to diversify their lists changed your approach as a writer? Do you feel freer or more cautious? For me it’s easier in the sense that I don’t have to work out which publishers are being genuine in their efforts, but also, it’s difficult that the shutters are being pulled up when I’m trying to get a book out there.

JR: Over the past 20 or 30 years, the publishing industry has changed enormously in terms of its focus, and its openness. In the 90s in particular, there were a lot of mergers; we had over 25 very well established and very well-known publishers prior to that time, and now we only have four big publishers. The kinds of investments that we made in that industry became quite preeminent. Jeremy Poynting and I did an interview some time ago with the Bookseller where we talked about how the publishers that are publishing now, seem to invest not so much in writers and their careers, but in books. This largely explained the phenomenon of the debut novelist. A week doesn’t go by, or a month doesn’t go by, when you don’t see some big thing about this fantastic debut novelist. I have been doing some statistical analysis of how many of them remain in the limelight.

A classic example of the opposite of that is Bernardine Evaristo. Bernardine was writing for over 40 years, but her publisher, Simon Prosser, acquired her first book, called Lara. He was visionary, because what he was seeing was not a writer who can earn the company some money, but a writer with phenomenal potential. He stuck with her throughout her writing career, and she delivered the Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other. With today’s new approach, you’ll see less examples like this, unless you have a highly enlightened publisher who understands.

Another thing that I see that has shifted is that one’s public image and the extent to which one can have a presence on social media, has become a part of the marketing tool. I’m not trying to discredit anybody, everybody deserves a break, frankly, but the point is that even though you might have writers who are perfectly able to articulate the literature, it’s no longer about the integrity of the work but a lot of it is to do with the persona of the person.

It’s not just the publishing industry, I don’t want to get too hard on them, but I compare it to a spring door. Whenever something big, like George Floyd, happens, or whenever some event happens that shakes or disturbs the dominant narrative that society has of itself, they will open the door, so you think that it’s open permanently, but the door is a spring door – it closes back automatically. Now I’m seeing a new kind of novel that is interested in being quite sensational to make a whole heap of money. But at the end of the day, my great-great-great-grandchildren, when they look back, where is the possibility of understanding what life was like for their great-great-great-grandparents. What was society like? These things bother me. They are personal preoccupations that I have.

But something very important that Ashley said, is that in his writing, the emphasis is on story, which is what it’s all about. Regardless of the message you have lying underneath, people read it for the immersion in things happening to people, happening around people, the way your characters negotiate life, the way they get through challenges. That, for me, is at the heart of all of it, and that is universal. Nobody has a prerogative on that. I think that if you stick to that, which is what you’re doing, then you’re on the right path. The difficulty arises now when people, the ‘gatekeepers’ as we call them, bring their own social, cultural, and racial attitudes to your writing. Because then it’s no longer a story, it becomes a statement, it becomes racialised or culturalised if it’s a different culture. It’s more to do with, ‘does that add to my story, or my idea of myself, or the people I represent, their idea of themselves?’ That’s really what the problem is. The problem is never, never the writing. A good book is a good book, is a good book, regardless of who writes it or where it comes from. The problem has always been who decides on the relevance of this book for the readership. How many Black writers receive a note along the lines of, ‘think your book is brilliant, it’s well done, it’s wonderful, but we cannot find a market for this book’? In other words, ‘white readers aren’t going to like this book because it’s not speaking to them about themselves.’ It’s nonsense! That’s not what writing is about.

AT: I resonate so much with so many of Jacob’s points, but specifically of Bernadine, and her writing. In 2019 when Girl, Woman, Other came out and blew up, and the amount of books I then saw come out with this silhouette of a Black woman’s face with a head wrap, or a black woman’s head, was huge. They’re all trying to tap into that, and that is what publishing does. It will always try and follow a trend and to make some money off of it. But the thing that minorities don’t have is that we don’t always get to fail and come back from it if things don’t go in the way that we hope. So, we won’t get the leeway that certain other authors have been allowed, even if their books don’t necessarily sell a lot. And that leads really nicely into career longevity, which was the point that Jacob articulated so well.

Years and years before I came into the industry, it would have been a lot harder as a writer of colour in the first place to get in. But there definitely is something now to publishers putting a lot behind the debut, and then that energy just isn’t necessarily there if you haven’t sold a lot. And with your writing career, in years gone by, it might not have been the first book, it might have been, the 5th, the 7th, before the big break or the award winner. Not all writers now are going to have that luxury. I had a two-book deal, and this time last year, I’d gone into the new year having had a conversation with the head publicist at my publisher, and it was made clear that the sales weren’t as great for the first book as they’d hoped, and the second book was not going to have proofs, or have X and X and X thing. So, you’re getting the kind of message that the energy’s not really there, and that was sad for me because I felt like Spirit Warriors was in many ways, a better book than my first.

I know the quality of my stories (I’m not being, big-headed when I say this) but I feel when I’ve got something that I know kids are going to enjoy. I’m happy with it, because I’ve nailed exactly what I wanted it to be. But not everybody knows the industry like I know it, having worked in it too, and I will always be pushing whatever I can to make sure that I’m not forgotten, and to make sure that I’m in touch with a lot of independent bookshops as well. It’s the indies who have done major things for me, and those relationships have helped massively – as well as school visits and just trying to get myself out there. All of that has really helped me, but that’s not everybody’s journey. So, I’ve had this one book deal for another middle grade, but I’m also now about to progress with my first young adult book and it kind of feels like I’m starting again because we don’t have a deal. I’m writing it in this current climate, and hopefully, the writing speaks for itself, but you just don’t know, right?

So it hasn’t necessarily changed the way that I’m writing, but I’m currently writing a fantasy with romance elements. It will most likely be pushed to the romantasy market, even though the romance isn’t a focal point of the story. That was the story I chose to write out of all the ideas I had – one, because the energy was there, but also because it did seem like it was the most likely to hopefully take off and make a sale to survive again. So, there’s that as well.

HM: Thinking about Jacob’s point around writing as an archival act, and Bernardine’s career being this example of having that luxury of time, and contrasting that with what you’re saying, where the focus now is on the debut. I wondered – what do you want to sustain, to carry into the future, when the visibility is gone? When maybe the book is out of print, and it is existing just in a library or on a personal bookshelf? Also, what luxuries do you feel you have now as a writer? Like, maybe it’s how has your relationship to time changed, i.e. the time to draft something, to fail, to change direction, as you are, Ashley, now, into YA?

AT: If we think about the British canon of children’s fiction and that fantasy space especially – you’ll always have, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Philip Pullman. There’s definitely something about all these writers as well, right? Something we all know. They were all white men. I think Katherine Rundell will probably join them now as well, with Impossible Creatures and such, but there is something about all these British works where there’s a similar thread running through them. And there are no writers of colour on that that canon, and I hope eventually I’ll be able to write a book that resonates hard enough that it will be on that, and that’s something that people go back to, regardless of ethnicity, something that people will say ‘That is a story that should be in classrooms and reading lists.’ That would be the dream, that you’ve had something you’ve written that is able to make that indelible mark. That’s the first thing for me, I think.

The other thing with publishing is that some people are lucky to have an editor who’s with them for most of their career. But now editors change jobs a lot, and I’m lucky that I’ve had the same editor for my two, three books now, and I know it’s somebody who understands me and my work. From our very first call, I got the sense that we would work together really well, because I was asking what she initially thought might change [with the story], to get a sense of whether she felt the same as I did about it. Thankfully it’s worked out so well, and with an indie publisher, I feel like I’ve got maybe a bit more freedom to take some risks, and even for them to take some risks on the kind of things I’m writing.

In terms of time, now that I’m full-time writing, I do have quite a bit more, so I’m trying to make the absolute most of it now. Being in my late 30s, I feel like there’s a lot of time to make up for.

JR: You’re a very young man, you know, this age thing that you’re trying to sell me, I’m not convinced. You’re young, you’re young… not even relative to me, you’re just young. And you have a lot of time ahead, so you use that time, you invest in that time, and you’re trying to kind of negotiate your way out of this. Another thing I wanted to say to you, Ashley, that’s based on my experience, and probably it’s part of your experience too, but the reliance, doesn’t only have to be on a British readership if you have good publishers, and I suspect you do have agents who can sell the rights to your book.

There’s a thing also in terms of emerging markets. The West Africans are doing some really interesting things with Afrofuturism, which is not necessarily all that divergent from what you are doing, and there’s a market there. And you are necessary, I think, as a writer. I’ll get your books, and I’ll just start shouting – certainly to all of my colleagues. I have two young grandkids, they’re going to read your book, I can guarantee that, so you’ve got sales already.

AT: It’s interesting, I kind of thought that my books would sell easier in the US than they have over here, actually. And neither of them sold in the US at all.

JR: The US has a problem with book banning, and things like this will probably make things harder for us. But that’s not why you write. You write because you have something to say, and because you must.  It will change again, it will come around, and we would be stronger, and I suspect we’ll be more aware of the kinds of the obstacles that we have to negotiate. We won’t stop, because they’re not going to win this argument, trust me.

I like England a lot, you know, and I like British people, and I’m not saying this trivially. I love the country, and the people, I find, are better than the governments. All we need to do is to continue doing what we’re doing. Rewriting the stories, filling in the silences, filling in the history that has been ignored. And we’ll have resistance, because nations define themselves by their own national narrative, their history. Britain has, for a very long time, been “civilising” nations around the world, and then there are a whole heap of people now who are coming up and saying, ‘hang on a minute, it wasn’t exactly like that, you exterminated this population’. And it’s uncomfortable, because what we’re doing is shifting a whole nation’s perception of itself. It’s a big one; that’s the kind of difficulty that we throw at them. It’s hard to absorb that – imagine growing up and becoming an adult, and you discover that the person who you always grew up to think was your father isn’t your father, or your mother isn’t your mother. It’s a real psychological shock. So, they fight it. That’s what it’s all about.

HM: I want to thank you both for such a far-reaching, and engaging conversation. I want to open up the space for you to ask each other something or discuss something that hasn’t come up yet in this conversation. Jacob, you’ve already kind of led on this by speaking directly to Ashley.

AT: Yeah, I think for me – and we kind of touching on this just now – inverse I guess, dark periods where it seems like you’re fighting against the Zeitgeist. How do you maintain your motivation and not feel like, ‘what’s the point in this?’

JR: I think the self-belief is believing in the necessity and the importance of what you’re doing. I’ll give you a good example. I’ve always had some very serious enemies in the Caribbean, and that’s because I gave a lot of primacy to women in my writing. Women are the dominant forces, and they are the agents of change. Not because the goal is to be feminist, but because in studying Caribbean history, I learned very deeply and very quickly (although it took me years to really absorb) that women are the backbone of Caribbean society. So, women have a lot of agency on my pages, but there are men who genuinely feel threatened by it. But what’s interesting is that over the past couple of years, that resistance began to fall away. And people are now much more ready to engage in the debates and the conversations, and to examine themselves.

But can you imagine a future where new generations of your family pick up your book and sit down to read it, and they think wow this is how my great-great-great-uncle thought… in other words, your mind is alive with them. In other words, you’re not dead. You are alive on your page. Even at that very personalised familial level, you have left something of yourself behind.

AT: I think the centring of women in stories has been a very conscious thing for me in this era, because we haven’t tackled anywhere near enough of this societally ingrained misogyny that particularly young boys have. I feel like secondary school is too late to be tackling some of these issues. Even though the first book is called The Boy to Beat the Gods, structurally, women are there as key allies. Then with the second book my publisher did ask at the time whether I could make the protagonist a boy, and there were specific reasons why I didn’t want that to happen. You have to challenge these things by increments and just show them a different way. It’s so important especially because society is already telling boys that they are the main character.

JR: Yes, and it’s not as if young boys have never met defiant female characters. In a way we’re not doing anything new, we’re utilizing a feature of our lives in narratives.

The post I Wish there Had Been Writers Like You Writing about Characters with Which My Children Could Have Identified appeared first on English PEN.

Do you know this Robert Lowell verse?

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war — until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.

Do you know the line in the PEN Charter that says, ‘PEN DECLARES FOR A FREE PRESS AND OPPOSES ARBITRARY CENSORSHIP IN TIME OF PEACE?’

‘IN TIME OF PEACE’ – for whom? What does peace mean? Does it mean stockpiling atomic weapons, leased from our lethal unreliable partners in crime? Does it mean the military industrial status quo? Does it mean proxy wars in more countries than I could list? Does it mean the continuation of a forever war of exploitation, inequality, regime change, that seeks at all costs to preserve the supremacy of one way of life over any other? In this time of corruption, surveillance, torture, immigration raids, detention, and weaponised borders, need we clarify again and again that our peace rests on bloody foundations, that the geopolitical logic of our civilisation long ago relied on a criminal – if not pathological – abandonment of principles of peace?

To sit in our lecture halls and meeting rooms and call this a time of peace when atrocious crimes against civilians are at such a scale that experts warn of ‘no such thing as humanitarian law’, a ‘critical breaking point for humanity’ – when does acceptance calcify into collusion?

When Voltaire said ‘civilisation does not diminish barbarism, it perfects it,’ could he have imagined the bombastic depth and range of contemporary barbarism, as perfectly unthinkable as the utopian alternatives, perfectly unnavigable, just as my propositions in this speech are perfectly, absurdly, bombastically romantic; is that my soldier/journalist/politician/neighbour just laughing his arse off?

First and foremost, don’t we urgently need a reclamation of the word ‘Peace’ from the genocidaires and criminals who misuse it, just as they misuse ‘Defence’, ‘Security’, ‘Order’? What do we do when language itself has been rendered meaningless?

Speaking of meaningless, speaking of barbarism, speaking of monotonous sublime: this is the golden era of peace-washing, this is the gilded, blood-spattered circus era of Trump’s Foundation of PEACE, where an assortment of felons and war criminals build fantasy developments on the unburied bodies of slaughtered civilians, the newly AI glitching iteration of a centuries-old oil and mineral-hungry colonial barbarism. Is there nothing new under the capital sun? Isn’t shutting USAID the ultimate act of violence? Won’t it kill more people than a thousand nuclear bombs could? Is it seven or eight countries that Trump, self-proclaimed ender of wars, has bombed since I started writing this speech? How many Tomahawk missiles each at a cost of three million dollars have America and Israel dropped on Iran and Lebanon since I started writing this speech? How many murdered, displaced, traumatised? To what end?

Is Pete Hegseth just the twenty-first century unhinged iteration of the psychopathic crusader-baron of the Middle Ages? Apocalyptic faux-Christianity wedded to colonial exploitation wedded to pure blood sport, video game TikTokified, erectile, industrial, wargame insanity wedded to industrial, and economic, and racial supremacy, with or without the permission or approval of the ruling hegemony, but acting ever so steadily and committedly, ever so doggedly, in its interests? Hasn’t it only ever sown chaos, hasn’t it only ever wreaked havoc? So why are we acting surprised?

Is pacifism a dangerous idea? Aren’t there countless instances in human history where non-violent policies or protests prolong conflict or sacrifice the vulnerable or gullible, or create dangerous martyrs, and therefore cause more deaths? Isn’t the logic of perpetual harm a sublime manifestation and evolutionary control mechanism of human nature? Is the proof not in the pudding, on and off the page? Am I sounding a little bit Churchillian? Churchill? Shall we play the evergreen social media game of ‘Was he a hero or a genocidal maniac?’ again and again, both and both, neither and nonsense, until we are calcified into immobile yelling machines while a handful of men in suits do it all over again?

Why am I writing this speech in questions? Have you read that book, The Interrogative Mood? Did you find it hard work? Did you find it somehow more alluring or fit for purpose than the social realist narrative modes we are more used to in a time of rampant existential crises? Am I so uncomfortable with the idea of a novelist being given a platform, being given any kind of authority or invitation to speak, to hold forth, to have opinion, that I am hiding behind this gimmick? Am I writing this speech in questions to find some kind of formal device that adequately sidesteps the speechifying lectern-easy novelist pontificating tone I find so hard to reconcile with the crisis – not only in my field, but in literacy, in the community, in the body politic? Do you mind if I stray from a rhetorical path more often than find it?

What about starting with a tone of peace? We know what it can’t be, don’t we? It can’t be the howling, braying debased hollering of the Westminster chamber; it can’t be the bought complicit mimicry of the newsmen; it cannot be the toxicity and propaganda of the tabloids; it cannot be the elite, exclusionary language of the academy. So, doesn’t it have to be a radically decentred sound? Doesn’t it have to be closer to communal improvised music than to discourse?

Am I inviting ridicule from the imaginary critic in my head and my real critics on the other side of the political collapse in order to flagellate? Am I desperately seeking a mode of honest, bewildered utterance because the sheer toxicity of the moment has defeated me? What Pankaj Mishra calls a worldwide ressentiment, the swarm of mass disillusionment…  where do my peaceful feelings sit between collective impotent overwhelm and fantasies of violent revenge? And anyway, don’t you hate novelists opining? But don’t you love it when a novelist gives enough of a shit to stick their neck out? How to be both? Whether to be either?

Is this an apology? A humbling? Am I arguing against myself for want of an easier adversary than the savagely counterproductive online word storm?

Am I being deliberately, obstreperously, cowardly, anti-newsworthy? Did you hear about the left-wing British novelist who has called for peace? What is he, seven? Shall we all lay down our arms and read translated novellas? What good will that do?

Am I squandering the opportunity to make a point by issuing an ambient rallying call? Do I want to perform a certain vulnerability, bewilderment, formal collapse, insecurity, uncertainty, because I am so allergic to the alternatives? Am I tone-sick? Am I alone? Are we not lost?

Am I even a pacifist, really? Did I feel peaceful towards the settlers in Masafer Yatta as they came across the stolen hill to harass, intimidate, assault, burn, and plunder? Do I just want the unfairnesses, injustices, and technological imbalances removed? Do I believe in a fair fight? What’s it got to do with me?

Should literature stop feigning interest, mind its own bloody business? Does it need to keep itself separate, delayed, retroactive, abstracted? Should it proclaim its unearned and unfair advantage and slink off?

What would a literary opposition to violence even sound like? A poem? An improvised dulcimer drone? A manifesto? A workshop in a school? A strike? A delegation to our enemies? The sound of a human fist on a reinforced plastic shield?

Am I afraid to say what I think because of the climate we are in whereby truth and error, fact and fiction, report and mindless retort are all in the same whiplashed churn of comment and opinion, and I can’t bear the noise, and I can’t bear the madness, and I would rather address my questions to the dead than the living. And isn’t that just being a reader – let alone being a writer? And if I pose a question to 2025 that Hannah Arendt posed to 1935, am I simply hiding in the imaginary space, the imagined dignity, of what she called the vita contemplativa, paying lip service to an old intellectual hierarchy — is that it? Am I asking these questions because I am extinct, we are extinct, the reign of the written word is over, nobody reads, the political action is elsewhere, it is beyond the word? But do I mourn that? Are we resigned to this? Are we fighting? Do we need to find our teeth? What strange currency am I turning around in the grip of my queasy, corrupted, sickened English tongue when I even utter the word peace in an apocalyptic moment for so many — is the question one of a complete and utter failure of solidarity? And isn’t that the first question for a writer: who are we standing with, marching for, pledging allegiance to?

Is it ludicrous to ask?

Why have ideas of peace become fringe, laughable, when discredited bigotries and socioeconomic fallacies are peddled as the norm? Is it the scale of the financial imperative, the entanglement of profit and violence, that has wormed its way into our homes, our routines, our addictions, our spirits, and to acknowledge it as vulgar, pointless, immature would require too painful a reconfiguration? Is it too costly an experiment to entertain rebuilding a system along non-violent lines, cherishing the lives of others as we cherish our own, as writers do in our fictions all the time? Why is something that makes basic sense so roundly discredited? Is it the sheer weight of 14,000 wars on our collective conscience? Is this line of questioning naive, immature, oh god, Dad, am I a woke?

Are we so po-faced, strapped into our death cult, that we cannot see the joke is on us?

Milan Kundera said, ‘Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate, only the most naive of questions are truly serious,’ so is the global community of writers a relentless question machine demanding no answers? Might we re-child our ideas of solidarity, of community, of survival – weren’t all utopias deemed childish compared to the big, grown-up work of bombing the fuck out of stuff, and Hurting People? Just because we are centuries deep into a violent way of doing business with the planet and one another, does it mean we cannot brainstorm some alternatives?

Am I seeking refuge in the simplicity of these ideals because of the atmosphere of the present, where every opinion is immediately contaminated by its associate opinions, or debunked by an automated counterfactual, or stored as evidence against future opinion by the frantically self-regenerating but unregulated industry of accusation and riposte?

Is this why the Times called me a hippy? Wasn’t I flattered really? In amongst the ads for 4x4s and Murdoch-sieved, middle English, welly boot populism, wasn’t it nice to be caught raging, weeping, and praising trees? Is any rational mind and functioning human heart not absolutely devastated? Shouldn’t we all be screaming? What spectacular sedative have we taken?

Aren’t you frightened? Of the coming weather? Of the state? Of yourself? Of pain? Of death from above? Of losing your loved ones, your home? No? Because we are the creators of those events, rarely the recipients. But would you allow me a second, in a public place, with witnesses, to say I am grieving, I am mourning for people I have never met, for babies I never rocked to sleep but love, dearly, desperately love, and if this opens me up to ridicule, please, sir, may I have some more? Please colonel, headmaster, vice chancellor, CEO, please can we have a politics of vulnerability? Can all emperors take off all new clothes? Am I calling for the triumph of earnestness over irony? Isn’t that a position almost uniquely ripe for ridicule in this climate, as Zack Polanski is discovering, but isn’t the braying mockery of the corrupted centre music to his ears?

Can we test a politics of pure solidarity, of concern? Of transience, change, gestures of kindness, cultures of dialogue, development, impermanence, flesh, not metal? Take off your suits, big egos, famous writers, important guests, award-winning cheeses, and beg for peace: can I beg for a break from the performance of strength? The most powerful man on Earth just shat his pants because not even he can win the war against the ageing body, but as Klaus Theweleit reminds us, he must forcefully subdue ‘any force that threatens to transform him back to the horribly disorganised jumble of flesh, hair, skin, bones, intestines and feelings that call itself human,’ use a new title, steal a new country, steal the word ‘peace’, use hair dye, bombast an army, post-truth piss, and artifice — may we be released from the war games men invented because they were so scared of being soft, susceptible, and scared?

Isn’t pacifism one of the only ideas we have left? Isn’t it radical? Might it be revolutionary?

Might there be more jobs for all of us in the peace-industrial complex? Might it be the key to our survival?

As the geriatric generation of tech innovators constantly tell us from their luxury retirement homes, the war we are fighting against the machine of our own making is now unwinnable. There will be no peace in the digital world, so the best we can wish for is stopgaps, security for those that can afford it. Wasn’t the alluring narrative of growth always really a fable of death – out of sight, denied, out of mind – and have we neglected the possibilities of life to such an extent that we are merely scrabbling for palliative techniques, ears blocked to the howls of our host, our kin, our system, our home?

Did you know that global military spending reached a record high of USD 2.7 trillion in 2024? Am I alone in finding that hard to comprehend? Does that not nag at one slightly while one is doing the weekly shop, sending what one can to Sudan, filling in one’s tax return… should we not all be kicking up somewhat of a FUSS ABOUT THIS? Did you know that only 3.5% of that 2.7 trillion would end global hunger? It could be done in the blink of an eye, but God forbid, get a life, dream on, don’t be insane/insane/insane/insane. Am I sounding like a broken record?

Am I risking my reputation as a ‘serious’ novelist by ranting on about the arms trade, standing outside the Elbit factory with a hand-painted sign, writing a fable for kids about dogs and bears fighting – do I give a shit? Should I keep my ideas about peace in the pages of an academic quarterly, for the knowing nods or condescending critiques of half a dozen other depressed leftists? Or should I leave them mildly abstracted, sieved by the literary mode du jour, peeking through the speech of my made-up characters but only terribly subtly? Are we not past subtlety? 100 years from Beckett, drifting around the endgame, yelping into our hand-held prisons – are we not utterly ridiculous?

Is this merely a political stance? Am I not simply showcasing my ideological bias, so allergic to nationalistic, militaristic, supremacist propaganda that I have gone away with the fairies?

Am I really so opposed to violence?

Do I want peace with racist patriots standing outside hotels housing migrants, swearing at children? Do I want peace with British men going to Calais and pouring detergent into refugees’ drinking water, calling themselves migrant hunters, or do I want to be part of a war against these men with the weaponry of law, reason, information, compassion, common sense?

How can we even formulate, let alone enact, a non-violent response to such uncompromising and relentless hatred – linguistic and actual? How might we reach the usually male actors within a violent system and release them from the briar of their pain, rage, and hunger for power, or has that ship sailed, is this a question for the children? And who am I to speak to someone who has been patronised, belittled, and cheated, and judge them for the inherent violence of the responses they feel are legitimate, urgent, and necessary won’t that make things worse?

We’re in a strange place, aren’t we? Activists seeking to disrupt the war machine, locked up without trial, on hunger strike, Quakers and nurses and retired doctors and children’s book authors and England’s greatest living poet, the ex-professor of poetry at Oxford being locked up for protesting a genocide — isn’t this an urgent crisis for anyone who writes, who reads? When any one of us can feasibly be arrested for writing the words ‘I OPPOSE GENOCIDE, I SUPPORT PALESTINE ACTION’, and our publishers can be charged under terrorism laws for selling our works, then surely the question of what writers do, and what words we use, and who decides what is true or not, what is a blank piece of paper, and what is an act of terror, is profoundly urgent? Have all these words – terrorist, protest, peace, genocide, law – been so emptied of meaning that we need some kind of emergency redefinition? Hal Foster asked: ‘What comes after farce in a post- truth and post-shame society, how to belittle a leader who cannot be embarrassed? What is the left to do when the right appropriates its cultural strategies?’

What comes after law, what comes after lawlessness?

What comes after never again?

What comes after the body of a distant other’s child? The body of our child? They are one and the same, so why are we pretending otherwise?

Why are the two groups most consistently wedded to pacifism veterans of war and writers? Veterans, because they have seen and know; writers because they have read books, wherein the horrors of war are laid bare and the correctness of the alternatives elucidated time and time again – but how laughable it seems to the men of industry to welcome veterans or writers to their busy, bloody feasting table, or am I being ridiculously simplistic?

As Richard Jackson asks, ‘How many military failures does it take to convince us that violence is actually a very poor tool of politics, and one that is highly unlikely to actually make things better?’ War is good for business, but is business all there is? Can the resolution to find alternatives to symbolic and actual violence only ever be a fantasy under capitalism? Is that the sound of someone at The Telegraph’s eyes rolling? Do I care? Didn’t they host the press conference where Suella Braverman said it was her DREAM to see migrants put on flights to Rwanda? Is she allowed a bombastic, sick, illegal, unrealistic dream? Are we only allowed to dream of profit, victory, security, defence? We all know these words mean death for someone else, don’t we? Shall we all just run headlong into extinction, beeping our horns, and revving our engines, and flinging anything that troubles us into prison? Out of sight, out of mind?

This is a problem of imagination, isn’t it?

Are we not all constantly hammering out the shape and depth and terms of our engagement, are we not all asking ourselves these questions privately? Can we not ask them together outside of violent binaries and crude oppositional politics? Am I asking these questions because I am defeated, disillusioned, disgusted? Are these questions the painful, performative cover-up for my misanthropic, nihilistic, real question which is: it’s over, isn’t it? Do I disagree so profoundly with myself that even to stand here speaking to you sickens me? Does the cultural body need time and time again to diagnose itself poisoned, sickly, dying? Does it need to nurture new growth, does it need rigorous pollarding, and will this not feel like violence?

Isn’t the best thing about PEN the history of its disagreements? Its arguments and inconsistencies and attempts to cross borders, to check we meant what we said when we gathered here last time?

Isn’t the Charter’s innate value as a template for disagreement? Didn’t HG Wells resign because of PEN’s bureaucratic inefficiency in supporting refugees? Didn’t Vargas Llosa resign because Jennifer Clement supported jailed Catalans? Isn’t this the organisational tree coppicing itself, growing strangely, naturally, through all its inconsistencies and discomforts?

Might PEN broker a peace between warring factions in our industry, in our culture, be the table at which fighting parties meet? Might it help insist that we keep fidgeting and squirming inside the definitions and terms we have inherited?

Should members of PEN ask awkward questions? In PEN’s own words, solidarity with Ukraine was ‘nonstop’, so why has it been partial or hesitant elsewhere? The protests last year at PEN America initiated a fundamental reckoning, didn’t they? Have we had double standards? Have we been biased? Have we been jeopardised, compromised, hijacked – isn’t that the point?

Is there a specifically English malaise when it comes to the sharp end of politics because this illusory peace gifted us the unearned and polluted advantage of stability from which to pontificate, judge, condemn, like the soft power world police, fattened by our own mirage of moral authority? ‘Alas, poor country, almost afraid to know itself’? And now, self-excommunicated from the European project, choked by rivers of our own shit – are we simply asleep? Has living in this notional time of peace robbed us of our senses? Shouldn’t PEN membership be booming as writers gather under an internationalist human rights banner? It cannot be apolitical, but could it be post-political? Could it be better than political?

Didn’t peace movements always have writers at the heart of things? Not only to clarify the futility, and document the agony, but also provide analysis, often of the handful of industrialists who truly benefit from conflict, and isn’t our job to show this and show this till we are blue in the face?

And didn’t it always necessarily involve a fight against our industry? Mark Twain’s ‘The War Prayer’ – a mighty anti-imperialist and pacifist gesture – was refused for publication because then just as now, aren’t fatuous justifications for war always louder than literature? Aren’t we now, as then, told to calm down, grow up, stop being hysterical? Aren’t the forces of anti-intellectualism, misogyny, and racism as potently intertwined as ever? Isn’t the absolute primal psychic reason for violence fear and hatred of the female, and can’t we see this as clearly on a gigantic industrial level as we can in the pages of our newspapers? Who’s afraid of a little psychoanalytical rummaging under our bonnets? Public calls for demilitarisation are met with the same linguistic tropes: ‘naïve’, ‘feeble’, ‘pathetic’, ‘childish’, ‘weak’. The suicidal pact with military spending is so obviously and tragically a patriarchal problem, so must we ask again and again the classic questions: ‘If not now, when?’ ‘Shall there be womanly times, or shall we die?’

When writers correctly and calmly suggested a festival funding model could be found without the support of hedge funds explicitly profiting from fossil fuel and military investment, weren’t we mocked, attacked, ridiculed, weren’t we told we were ruining the lovely, sweet egalitarian fairytale innocence and sweet, wine-sloshing delights of book festivals for everyone? But weren’t we the people who had actually worked the hardest for and with book festivals? And didn’t the festivals have their most successful year ever last year, because, of course, change is possible? Wasn’t that whole spectacle so revealing but also so counterproductive and depressing? Need we be forever locked into these patterns of attack and retort, these tapestries of snark and sneer, isn’t there a more productive approach? Is it so frightening to ask who pays and how they make their money? Aren’t there going to be some difficult conversations to be had? Do we need to smear and slander and resort to culture war insults every time someone has an idea for a cleaner or fairer world?

Left and right have melted into non-existent categories, we all agree: the great decline, the apocalyptic mode, you can’t say anything these days, none of us are free until all of us are free, everything’s broken, told you so, sold you a yes, sold you a no, gotcha, where did all the free speech warriors go? Do you want some whataboutery to go with your wishy-washy satyagraha?

Why is the dying political animal so defensive, can we not have better ideological palliative care?

Who’s afraid of a little transformative thinking?

Who’s afraid of a little anti-war sentiment?

Clive Bell’s pamphlet Peace At Once was confiscated by the Lord Mayor and burned in the streets, did you see? They were burning books in London town?
Do you remember Ernst Toller’s speech to PEN International during the rise of Nazism, do we see they are burning books in Berlin?

Do you remember Bertrand Russell was denied a passport to prevent him giving an anti-war speech at Harvard, when he asked in the shadow of the bomb, ‘Does man have a future?’ Do you remember when Lytton Strachey lost his job at The Spectator for his antiwar statements? Do you remember Sally Rooney could not travel to the UK because of her support for a proscribed organisation?

Is the suited and booted dying animal of the military industrial psychopathology so rattled? Must we invent new laws to lock up our activists, wait twenty years, rewrite history, then erect statues of them? The history of PEN International is a book of evidence; writers frighten power, so writers are exiled, banished, imprisoned, and we are used to seeing this abroad, and we mustn’t be surprised when we see it at home. Aren’t they rattled? Have they got to the judges? Will we defend the juries? They cannot even take questions from the audience, because what comes after lying? Only force? Only censorship and tyranny?

Isn’t this why PEN writers Writers for peace Peace Committee was established? To step forward when the contaminated political entity refuses? In the Balkans, in Russia, in Sierra Leone, in Mali, weren’t we forceful, even if inconsistent, in our solidarity? Didn’t we have the boundless reserve of moral clarity when all else was collapsing? Didn’t we have bodies we could use to cross borders? Should we not at all times be on an anti-authoritarian war footing, as a matter of principle, and on behalf of those who do not have these luxuries?

If there is a huge abyss between the way we see ourselves and the way we actually are, if there is a monstrous thing being done in our name, if we are a tiny cog in a lethal machine – don’t we need to see that reflected back at us in the shared mirror that is culture? If there is a reckoning, doesn’t it have to begin as a linguistic one? In the language of us, them, ours, theirs, owned, taken, owed, stolen, inherited, dependent, from here, from there, if this country needs to shake off an imperial delusion and find itself a proper meaningful, sustainable place in the New World Order then it might need to start with what it sees in the mirror, like the fable of the schooldays of Nigel Farage – does it matter what we did when we were reckless, feckless, privileged, ignorant, hateful younger versions of our reckless, feckless, privileged, ignorant, hateful contemporary selves? Is an apology enough? Might we not accept? Is there any escape from the shattering verdict that the ugly truths revealed are accepted, even celebrated, and we might need to go into exile from those closest to us?

Isn’t there an almost sociopathic gap between how we behave in our domestic spaces, what we value (the safety and health of our children, for example), and what we bestow upon the faraway other through our collective commitments, investments, and behaviours? Isn’t it bizarre? And if it is purely and ultimately a question of economic systems, might we invest even a fraction of what we invest in the machinery of war in the processes and tools of peace? Isn’t the evidence to do so utterly and magnificently overwhelming? How potent is the death drive? Wasn’t Rebecca West absolutely correct when she said, ‘We ignore this suicidal strain in history because we are constantly bad artists when we paint ourselves’? Do we need much, much better collective self-portraiture? Should we start with the fragile and damaging fantasies of mastery, control, and progress that leak out of the wounded and confused juggernaut of armed nation-states in their perpetual circus of theft?

If writers and artists are perfectly placed to shape the stories and collective reflections that might allow a change of direction, what’s making us such bad actors? Entrenchment? Laziness? Complicity? Defeatism? Fear?

Is it simply, in Allen Ginsberg’s blend of Jewish and Buddhist answers, a lack of rachmonis? An absence of compassion?

Aren’t writers ideally and almost uniquely well-positioned to do some of the re-engineering required to reframe the question of peace? We go into schools, we teach in prisons, we sit on charity boards, we meet people in bookshops and libraries, we travel to meet writers of different genres and languages – might we be in Vaclav Havel’s formulation ‘architects of some kind of rudimentary moral reconstruction’? Might we be the table, at which many can sit? If Brecht was correct that Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions, are we not guilty of perpetual, scratchy, pointless wars between ourselves? Am I being lofty? Am I being unsophisticated? Am I being romantic?

Are we not handlers of ideas and tone, whether we are historians, novelists, or journalists? Are we not – in sometimes tiny, and in sometimes significantly bankrolled, ghoulishly bigoted, allied to fascist tech overlord ways – engineers of sensibility?

At four minutes to midnight, Nicholas Humphreys wrote, ‘We forget sometimes our own power. What happens when an irresistible force meets a movable object? Why, it moves.’ Shall we move?

Enemies of compassion, decency, justice walk among us, and are mobilising with staggering efficiency – surely, we must do the same? ‘Our age seems entirely unfitted for such a task,’ wrote Simone Weil in 1937, observing murderous absurdities in the economic and political systems of her time, and might we go as Simone did, to where the war is being waged, and put our bodies in the way? Isn’t this why seeing Alice Oswald carried into a police van means more to me than a thousand tweets or Instagram posts, because she has pushed past the stalemate in a precisely poetic way? She has married the force of language with the gesture of the body in space to create meaning, and won’t that gesture last? Won’t it reverberate? Writers have often returned from war and issued warnings about the profoundly human oscillation between savagery and progress, and their warnings have, fatally, gone unheeded, so what is the mechanism by which we offer not a warning in fable form, but an insistence, an urgent intervention, a living proof that this oscillation is unsustainable. How do we nudge this insistence into the mainstream? Writers are exactly who should be on marches, disobeying that which is preposterous or poisonous, shouldn’t they?

Is the path to freedom not always collective action? Doesn’t research show that non-violent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change, and don’t we have access to at least 3.5%?

Isn’t well-organised disruption long overdue? To the claim that writers should get back in their box, isn’t the answer that our box is language, the singular shared box the weaponry? Is it so preposterous to gather our global community together and redesign the force of the written word against the new forms of violence and tyranny that have emerged in this illusory time of peace? Will it be an everyday war of deconstruction, revision, clarification, evidence, detail, nuance, an effort against a saturation of violent discourse, that might work, one word at a time, one gesture at a time, one network or coalition at a time?

Do I feel as Fela Kuti felt about music, that literature must ‘awaken people to do their duty as citizens and act’? If I don’t believe in that, what on earth am I doing?

Do you remember the video of Renée Nicole Good? Isn’t this a forever loop of the last words ‘I’m not mad at you, dude’ of the victim, versus the ‘fucking bitch’ of the armed murderer? State-sanctioned killer versus innocent citizen. And in that exact case, it was Poet versus Weapon, which is precisely where we are at, again and again and again, isn’t it?

May I finish with the purest expression of these ideas that I can possibly find? May I read you from another poem, ‘Green Madrigal (I)’ by Lynette Roberts?

Peace, my stranger is a tree
Growing naturally through all its
Discomforts, trials and emergencies
Of growth.
It is green and resolved
It breathes with anguish
Yet it releases peace, peace of mind
Growth, movement.
It walks this greening sweetness
Throughout all the earth,
Where sky and sun tender its habits
As I would yours.

The post Peace: Max Porter’s 2026 PEN Lecture appeared first on English PEN.

I thank you, members of English PEN and members of the jury, for I am honoured to win a prize established in memory of Harold Pinter, a great writer who continues to inspire so much loyalty and consistent high regard. My sincere thanks to Lady Antonia Fraser. I am grateful to the PEN Pinter Prize judges – the Chair of English PEN, Ruth Borthwick, poet and author Mona Arshi, and novelist Nadifa Mohamed. Thank you to Margaret Busby, the President of English PEN, Daniel Gorman, Director of English PEN, and all those who are responsible for me standing here today.

Lately, I’ve been watching, on social media, attempts to fix the damage that the war has inflicted on Khartoum, where I grew up. I watch student volunteers clearing up rubble in devastated hospitals, schools and universities. In the subdued marketplace, bananas are piled up for sale. Fifty years ago, I was with my father when he bought bananas from this very same market, and I remember the seller bragging that they were as sweet as custard.

Bookshops have reopened and I follow a little girl in neat, tight braids hurrying along on her first day of school. But the war is not over, the city is still almost deserted, and the fighting continues. For over two years the war in Sudan has caused immense suffering and death, massive numbers displaced and maimed; there is famine and disease. War is so humiliating. How we react when a loaded gun is pointed at us. How terrified we are when the bombs drop – afraid to shower, afraid to leave the house, too shaken to make sound decisions. How mean and small war makes us, all the shameful things we say and do to save ourselves and then the shattered dreams, the disrupted livelihoods, the shrunken futures.

Peace is infinitely better than war, but history teaches us that wars are inevitable, and conflict is part of life. It is also true that Sudan, because of its diversity and sprawl, has always been an administrative challenge. But there are ethics in war, laws and ancient conventions, to protect the weak and the elderly, to safeguard places of worship and crops – and these laws have been broken time and again. Hospitals bombed, children targeted, civilians intimidated and robbed, women raped and made homeless. Who is accountable for these war crimes? Who will be punished for the genocides in Sudan and Gaza? Who has the authority to do this? Young people are now marching for justice. Justice for Palestine and Sudan. Without justice, the balance of the world is undone. Justice is the gravity keeping us upright as humans.

I am in awe of all those who are striving for justice. The Palestinian journalists who have already died and those who continue risking their lives and being killed reporting on the genocide in Gaze. They are reporting in the most difficult circumstances, upholding high professional standards in extreme conditions. Their work is so valuable not only because they are exposing, with urgency, what is happening now but also because they are bearing witness and providing primary sources for the historical record. There are also Sudanese writers who remained in Sudan during the war, choosing not to flee so as to protect their personal libraries. This is so moving and courageous. The memoirs of these writers will be a vital testimony to what life was like in Sudan during the war.

When I was a student at Khartoum University in the 1980s, my parents didn’t allow me to join student protests. We were living under a military dictatorship, so it is a shock, now, to see all the arrests taking place in democratic Britain. I expect that British parents will start to warn their children against activism. There was recently an article in the Observer about the hunger strike carried out by the 29-year-old Palestine activist, Teuta Hoxha. She is one of 24 prisoners who are being held on remand in relation to a raid on an Elbit Systems factory in Filton. Teuta has been on remand since November 2024 and her trial is scheduled for April 2026. That’s seventeen months in prison awaiting trial. I am mentioning Teuta because, two years ago, I had a long telephone chat with her about her writing. A dear mutual friend had asked me if I would spare some time to help an aspiring writer. Teuta sent me a sample of her work entitled ‘Gods and Podcasts’. I could tell that she had talent and that her outlook was quirky and engaging. On a WhatsApp message she wrote saying, ‘I’ve had small interest from some agents so don’t want to let that boat pass, but I am a big procrastinator.’ I lost touch with Teuta after that, and I don’t know if she is writing while she is prison. I hope she is.

It was a big surprise for me to win the PEN Pinter Prize, a prize associated with ‘freedom of expression’. This phrase is unfortunately linked in my mind with hurtful insults towards Islam and Muslims. Long before the word Islamophobia came into use, Edward Said noted that ‘Malicious generalisations about Islam have become the last acceptable form of denigration of foreign culture in the West; what is said about the Muslim mind, or character, or religion, or culture as a whole cannot now be said in mainstream discussions about [other groups].’ These ‘malicious generalisations’ are, unfortunately, presented as examples of freedom of expression. Too often, a general condemnation of religion and the argument that ‘nothing is sacred’ develops into a targeted attack singling Islam.

Islamophobia is an inhibitor. It undermines the ability of Muslims to define themselves, to project themselves and to be true to who they are. If we, as Muslims, are always talking back, justifying, condemning, then we are always engaging in an agenda set by someone else. If we are putting our energies into challenging stereotypes and proving our humanity, we cannot take the initiative. Islamophobia poses as a mirror that reflects the truth about Muslims, but it is inaccurate. In Harold Pinter’s words, ‘When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections.’ The never-ending range of reflections that anti-Muslim prejudice generates are distortions; they are not the truth. As a result, young Muslims in Britain grow up ashamed of being Muslim, they try to hide, and they try to melt in, before coming to the realisation (or perhaps not) that Islam is a treasure for them to inherit. Islam is the ever-living substance that their immigrant parents carried with them with they entered Britain.

Islamophobia is the enemy of originality; it is out to put us firmly in a narrow place. An example of such narrowing is how Islam is seen as a religion that is specific to a particular race or races while identifying Christianity as a ‘world religion’. This is in complete contrast to how Islam sees itself as a universal religion for all people, with a sacred text, the Qur’an, which is a continuation of the revelations in the Torah and the Gospels. And Islam is not only about people, the Creator we worship is also worshipped by celestial bodies, living organisms and animals.

Fortunately, I have found that fiction can open conversations, rather than shut them down. I have found that by writing novels, I could invite readers to a more nuanced understanding of Islam and the religious experience. This centring of Islam in my writing was criticized by some, as ‘challenging’ and ‘likely to offend the sensibilities of its intended [secular] audience’. The assumption here is that a post-Christian, secular literature should also apply to other faith communities and other religions. If the English literary novel has a trajectory from Christian to secular, then this is expected to apply to all other religions.

Literature in English is not only Eurocentric but also Christian-centric, even though writers and readers regard it as secular or humanist. Every genre from crime to science fiction is heavy with Christian symbolism while secular literary fiction, even if it is in opposition to Christianity, is also still engaged with its ethos.

However, we must remember that, in Rehana Ahmed and Peter Morey’s words, ‘the secularisation thesis emerges through a Protestant Christian trajectory.’ There have been many successful religious novels written by Catholic novelists such as Muriel Spark, Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, C.S Lewis, and others. The literary canon would be so much poorer without Memento Mori, The End of the Affair, The Bridge of San Luis Ray and The Chronicles of Narnia. Recently, the work of Marilyn Robinson (though she is not a Catholic) is also a striking example.

The waning of religious faith in Europe and North America cannot be assumed to be identical in other parts of the world and within immigrant minorities in the West. Religious practice and affiliation in the Global South is higher in comparison to the secular North. Diversity in publishing still hasn’t fully taken faith into account. A more diverse literary culture would include Hinduism, Buddhism, and indigenous African religions and cosmologies. The novel with religious belief at its core might be fading in the secular North but it will go, as a New York Times article says, ‘where belief itself has gone.’

Authors operate in a publishing climate characterised by secularism, one that, as Sophie Lauwers says, ‘presupposes a very particular understanding of what counts as good ‘‘religion’’.’ This pressure to privilege secular values over a religious way of life can result in expressions of Islam in fiction that are self-conscious and reactive. The creativity needed to write plots, characters and situations that are influenced by Muslim sensibility can often be stifled or side-lined by the loud glare of headlines that speak of large-scale violence and political agendas. The intimate concerns and lives of Muslim fictional characters can then seem only relevant if they are attached to the larger popular narrative.

The challenge I face writing novels animated by religious belief and intended for the secular marketplace, is best articulated by Flannery O’Connor. She says, ‘The problem with the novelist who wishes to write about a man’s encounter with … God is how he shall make the experience – which is both natural and supernatural – understandable, and credible to his reader.’ How, indeed. My intention, too, has always been to soak my work unapologetically in Islamic values and the shariah. To ‘get away’ with this was to push against the boundaries of the secular literary market. Because of this, today’s recognition feels truly significant. It brings expansion and depth to the meaning of freedom of expression and whose stories get heard. I am grateful to my publishers and to my readers. I hope that readers, with or without faith, Muslims or not, will be able to find something in my work of benefit.

The PEN Pinter Prize is shared with a Writer of Courage, a writer who is active in defence of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty. It has been truly heartening to see the release of last year’s winner, Alaa Abd el-Fattah. Congratulations to Alaa and to his inspiring family.

It is a pleasure to share my prize today with a writer I have admired and read avidly over the years. She is a principled writer and a fearless activist, who has endured hate speech and physical threats. She is a wonderful, enriching writer who has already broken new ground in African literature in terms of language and representations of the collective, family life. Reading her work has opened my eyes to the injustices and consequences of war in Sudan. About the war, she has recently said, ‘As a writer, I have been and remain consumed by this blood-soaked history. I could never escape seeing the war’s sweeping panorama, which I describe as a map of violence in motion, claiming new territories with each turn.’

It is my honour to announce that the PEN Pinter Prize Writer of Courage 2025 is Stella Gaitano.

The post The Inaccurate Mirror: Leila Aboulela’s PEN Pinter Prize 2025 Speech appeared first on English PEN.

First, an apology. I was asked by English PEN to respond to any line, phrase or word from the four articles that make up the PEN Charter – and I’m afraid I’ve taken up this offer in the manner of a guest who has been invited for tea, ends up staying the weekend , and breaks the household china before leaving.

The household china in this case is Article 2 of the PEN Charter:

‘In all circumstances, and particularly in time of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion.’

Of course, the word that particularly stands out there is ‘patrimony’ or ‘inheritance from the male line.’ How odd that a large group of writers saw no contradiction in crafting the phrase: the patrimony of humanity. And yes, PEN was founded by a woman, Catherine Amy Dawson Scott. ‘Patrimony’ stands out because we so rarely hear it anymore; I can’t imagine that there’d be much objection if the next PEN Congress suggested replacing it with ‘inheritance’, so I’m going to do no more than make note of it before turning to the rest of the article which demands a more robust critique. Without the patrimony phrase this is what we have:

‘In all circumstances, and particularly in time of war, works of art should be left untouched by national or political passion.’

Let’s start with a question of definition.  There are many ways in which we now talk about politics – the politics of gender, the politics of race, the politics of class, the politics of child-raising etc. I am entirely on board with that expanded definition,  but for the purpose of this lecture I’m going to engage with Article 2 on its own terms – so, political means, as the OED would have it, ‘relating to the government or public affairs of a country’ or ‘relating to the ideas or strategies of a particular party or group in politics.’

The PEN Charter dates back to 1948 soon after the end of World War II and at the start of the Cold War, but to understand how and when Article 2 came to be we need to go back further, to the PEN Congress in Brussels in 1927. PEN was six years old, and its guiding ethos came out of the recent experience of World War I – a war    that was fought because of imperial expansionism and military alliances and resulted in nearly 40 million casualties. After four years of a war, and four years of hate-filled propaganda on both sides, the founders of PEN wanted to work towards unity among the writers of different nations, particularly formerly warring European nations. Other parts of the world where politics got in the way of writerly unity – for instance, every nation colonised by Europe – was of much less interest.

If unity was the goal for PEN in the 1920s, then everything that got in the way of unity had to be recognised and avoided. Politics was quickly targeted as a primary source of discord. Politics was responsible for war, for propaganda, for division.   Not everyone agreed that politics could be understood so narrowly let alone siloed off from literature and life itself. At the PEN Conference in Berlin in 1926 the German-Jewish anarchist revolutionary playwright Ernst Toller argued the point with the PEN President, John Galsworthy, telling him politics ‘is everywhere and influences everything.’ Galsworthy was in no way convinced. The following year, 1927, in Brussels at the annual congress PEN spelled out its three guiding principles, which included this:

‘In all circumstances, and particularly in time of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion.’

Six years later, in 1933, the PEN Congress was held in Dubrovnik. By this time Galsworthy had died, and PEN had a quite different President: HG Wells. Also by this time the Nazi party had come to power in Germany and Ernst Toller had been exiled. When German PEN refused to answer questions about book burnings, Wells gave the floor to Toller. The German PEN delegation walked out and was subsequently expelled from PEN.

A few years later, in 1940, Wells was one of the many writers to sign a letter from the PEN London centre entitled ‘Appeal to the Conscience of the World’, which called on all writers, everywhere, to urge the world to join the fight against Nazism.  A moral position to be sure, but also very much a political one. Despite the letter – and PEN’s embrace of political passions – in 1948 the three guiding principles from Brussels 1927, including the one about art untouched by politics, became the first three articles of the PEN charter.  A new article, Article 4, was added in 1948. This is the article most of us probably think of when we think of PEN because it is the first to talk about free expression. It also contains this sentence: ‘[PEN] believes that the necessary advance of the world towards a more highly organised political and economic order renders a free criticism of governments, administrations and institutions imperative.’   I’m going to repeat that: a free criticism of governments, administrations and institutions is imperative.

How did the PEN leadership imagine that this new article could co-exist with Article 2?

A clue may come from Wells’s address to the PEN Congress in Edinburgh, in 1934. In the time between the 1933 and 1934 Congress, Germany had moved even further into Nazi totalitarianism. Against that backdrop, Wells told the PEN Congress: ‘When Politics reaches up and assaults Literature and the liberty of human thought and expression, we have to take notice of Politics. If not, what will the PEN club become? A tourist agency – an organisation for introducing respectable writers to useful scenery – a special branch of the hotel industry?’’

Wells is doing something very careful here, it seems to me, though I’ll leave it to Wells scholars to tell me if he was doing it from conviction or to try and prevent schism within the organisation. Wells’s position is not that of Toller.  He does not take the view that politics ‘is everywhere and influences everything.’

He argues, rather, that PEN has to take notice of politics in certain exceptional circumstances when Politics reaches up and assaults Literature and liberty. In Wells’s imagery Literature is lofty, Politics is low and violent. In unexceptional times, the two are separate. That is to say, most of the time PEN can separate Art from Politics; but every now and then, it absolutely cannot.

I’m going to take you now to a hairdressers’ on 16 January 16 2025.  The hairdressers’ is in Gaza, the date is one day after the ceasefire was announced, two days before it was due to come into effect, the woman who is writing about it is the playwright, novelist and short story writer Nahil Mohana. Her words are translated from the Arabic by Resist Crisis Translation and Basma Ghalayini:

‘The occupation usually intensifies its raids just before a truce comes into effect so I’m surprised by the sight of five brides, each waiting their turn, along with fifteen other women here, to dye their hair in preparation for the truce. . . The main focus of discussion is about the things we will do once the ceasefire comes into effect. The list is long.’

The list has 25 points. Because of time constraints, I’m going to skip the first ten and start at number 11. The whole list, and much else that’s extraordinary is in the book Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide published by Comma Press.

11. We will smoke cigarettes and shisha again, and be spared from the cursing in our streets as a consequence.

12. We will eat meat, chicken, shawarma, maftoul, eggs, fresh vegetables, juices and ice cream.

13. I will kiss my husband, because I miss our moments together.

14. Our children will return to school and to discipline.

15. Families will reunite, the South will join the North, and we will see our loved ones.

16. We will go back to drinking high-quality coffee, sold for 14 shekels instead of 60.

17. We will no longer be devoured by drones, the quadcopter will be out of our lives.

18. We will mourn the martyrs and the missing with honour and dignity.

19. We will go back to walking in the streets without fear of shrapnel or going out and never coming back.

20. We will eat grilled corn on the promenade.

21. We will bathe under a shower.

22. We will light the streets at night.

23. We will stop following the news; in fact, one of the women offers to donate her TV.

24. We will go back to washing machines instead of hand washing.

25. I will bury my son who remains under the rubble of the house.

Imagine telling any of the women in that hairdressers’ shop that art should be untouched by national and political passion, particularly in time of war.  Untouched, how? The war is happening because of politics, the ceasefire has been brokered because of politics, the ceasefire will be broken because of politics. When Article 2 posits an ideal separation between Art and national and political passions in times of war it entirely fails to recognise the reality of that hairdressers in Gaza in January 2025.

Nahil Mohana’s list reflects the truth of Toller’s assertion: politics is everywhere and influences everything. It doesn’t just influence whether you can bury your son or not, it also influences the price of coffee, the possibility of eating corn on the promenade, the presence of electricity, the soundscape of your neighbourhood – is it the babble of children coming home from school, or is it drones and missiles?

But in times of war is not the root of the problem with Article 2 any more than the word patrimony is. We can whittle away and whittle away the article and it remains not just problematic but nonsensical so long as it continues to view politics as something that can, let alone should, be separate from art.

I’d like to draw your attention more closely to Toller’s phrase ‘politics is everywhere’.  It doesn’t just mean ‘everywhere, during times of war.’  It doesn’t mean ‘everywhere, when the far right is on the rise’. It doesn’t mean ‘everywhere in Gaza.’ It means, everywhere.

In March 2020 we were told to go into our homes, avoid contact with anyone who didn’t live with us. We were told to stay away from the bedsides of dying relatives. We were told not to embrace other mourners at funerals.

Those of us who had certain kinds of jobs had to stay at home; those who had other kinds of jobs, often the most dangerous kinds of jobs, were told to keep on doing them as before, for a long time without proper protective equipment. The weeks became months became a year, a second year. Our borders were closed to people entering from certain nations. Other borders were closed to us. We could not enter particular spaces unless we showed a code that confirmed we had followed certain rules laid down for us which many people didn’t want to follow.  I don’t say this as someone who is critical of rules having been imposed during a pandemic.  I say it to make that point that when all that happened we should have realised, those of us who didn’t already know it, how deeply politics touches every moment of our life. We should have realised that the liberties we took for granted were actually a consequence of the political framework in which we live.

It stands to reason, doesn’t it? If censorship is political so is the absence of censorship. If bombs falling on you happen because of politics then the fear of nothing more than violent than weather dropping from the sky is also because of politics. When the weather is more violent, more extreme than at any other point since records began, that also is politics.

Homophobic laws are politics, and so are the lives that people can live as a consequence of those laws being overturned.

Knowing you can be stripped of citizenship in the country where you’ve lived your whole life is politics and so is knowing your continued citizenship is assured no matter what you do.

The ability to safely have an abortion is politics; the ability to sponsor your spouse for citizenship in the country where you live, regardless of your income, is politics.

Travel bans are politics and the ability to travel between countries is politics.

The suspension of civil liberties is politics; being accorded human rights is politics.

Speaking up and taking to the streets against your government when it provides moral and military cover to a genocide is politics, and so is not doing these things.

Taking part in a cultural boycott as an act of solidarity with an oppressed people is politics and saying no, art should be separate from politics is politics.

School fees preventing you from going to university: politics. Leaving university mired in debt: politics. The inability to afford a mortgage despite your university degree and your job: politics. Waiting months for cancer treatment that needs to happen now: politics.  Asthma because of the bad quality of the air you breathe: politics. No libraries where once there were libraries: politics. An uptick in racism: politics. Raising or teaching or being any of the 4.5 million children living in poverty in a country with the world’s 6th largest economy: politics.

Lighting the streets at night, bathing under a shower, eating grilled corn on the promenade, going to school, kissing your husband, burying your loved ones: politics.

Everything I’ve listed is political for everyone, whether in war or in peace, whether it is easy to do it or impossible. There are times when politics suffocates us, there are times it allows us to breathe. It is politics either way.

This is what the feminists who took up the line ‘the personal is political’ understood: we live within a particular political framework which creates a specific political culture.  That political culture sets the norms, it names what is permissible and what is transgressive. It says ‘you can’ and ‘you cannot’.

How is our Art ever to be free of political passions when everything we have to be passionate about – the people we love, the books we read, the natural world we cherish, the clean air our bodies want us to breath – is so tied up in politics.

For many of us who grew up in places where politics was more suffocating than not one of the main stories of the 21st century has been the vast swathe of politically progressive ground that  has been ceded so easily, in countries where the consequences to political engagement and opposition have been so comparatively low. Too many have chosen the politics of non-engagement, which is at best a hair’s breadth away from acquiescence or complicity. In the lives of writers, the frankly bizarre and incoherent idea that Politics and Art should be separate has played a key role in fermenting this non-engagement.

And frankly that bizarre idea makes the PEN Charter incoherent too. English PEN’s website tell us that the PEN Charter has ‘guided, united and inspired its members for over 60 years.’ But how can it unite us when we have Article 2 urging Art to stand apart from politics, and Article 4 which is absolutely drenched in politics?  Wells’s attempt to hold the two in balance relied on a division between art and politics, but that division is entirely illusory.

The illusion has done us no good and it has done our literature no good. It is an embarrassment to English PEN and all its fine work of political engagement to continue to enshrine such an idea in its Charter. And there are practical implications: any PEN Centre or any member of a PEN Board that doesn’t want to engage with politics that need urgently to be engaged with can simply point to Article 2 in defence of its position.

I’d like to propose that at the next PEN Congress, Article 2 be struck off the Charter.

No one should have been using that piece of household china, anyway; too many cracks in its surface.

The post Respectable Writers and Useful Scenery appeared first on English PEN.

Thank you for this invitation. There are few activities I enjoy more than praising Arundhati Roy.

Under normal circumstances, I would be more than happy to spend all of my time on stage recalling favourite characters in her gorgeous novels, and reminding all of you of some of her greatest one-liners.

And no, I’m not talking about the ones about another world breathing that were the italicized email signatures of half the people you knew in early 2000s.

I’m not even referring to the ‘pandemic is a portal’ – those words that pierced the early shock of Covid-19 and helped so many of us to grasp that this cataclysm was going to take us somewhere new and different, and that we had urgent choices to make about what we wanted to bring on that journey.

I’m talking about deeper Arundhati cuts, lesser-known framings that also helped us get our bearings and keep our wits when history suddenly started moving in fast forward.

Like after 9/11, when George W. Bush declared ‘you are either with us or with the terrorists’ and Arundhati reminded us then that we did not have to choose between ‘a malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs’ – that all the beauty on Earth existed between those two poles.

Or when US fighter jets pummelled Afghanistan with bunker busters, and then followed up by airdropping packets of food aid, and Roy described the display as ‘brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam’.

Or what she said about the way our phones have become extensions of bodies: ‘Imagine if your liver or your gallbladder didn’t have your best interest at heart.’

Or her scathing take on middle class, professionalized environmentalism, which, she says, ‘Asks the question: How can we change without changing?’

I could go on – I’m a collector, you see, an Arundhati-ologist.

Her novels create worlds nestled within worlds and then worlds within those. The characters in The Ministry of Upmost Happiness embody and inhabit the riotous, uncontrollable diversity that Roy has, for so long, been trying to defend against the dull, monocrop twins of global capitalism and ethnonationalism.

John Berger once observed that Arundhati’s fiction and non-fiction walk her around the world on two legs. Which means that if we want to understand the uniqueness of her stride, we must look and them together, as companions.

Roy has written dozens of non-fiction essay and lectures, enough to fill over 1000 pages in her beautiful anthology, My Seditious Heart, and then some in her recent follow-up, Azadi.

What becomes clear in these pages is that, after God of Small Things, Arundhati became a kind of self-assigning war correspondent, seeking out the places of maximum pain, maximum injustice, maximum state violence – from Kashmir, the Maoist insurgency, the aftermath of the Gujarat Massacre, nuclear weapons tests, and the movement to defend the Narmada valley from drowning.

But she is Arundhati so she did not write about these conflicts and issues like a war reporter, she wrote about them like a novelist.  She brought her tremendous gifts as a writer – her bottomless capacity for imagination, her devastating eye for detail and for the perfect, unforgettable metaphor, to find poetry in protest chants, and gallows humour in guerrilla warfare. So many struggles for justice and survival were better understood, more deeply felt, because she chose to help us see them through her artist’s eyes.

There are some writers, though not enough of them, who are willing to confront the ugliest acts that humans are capable of unleashing onto other humans and the natural world. And there are also writers who search out beauty with great insistence, who fall recklessly in love with the world again and again.

But it is vanishingly rare for the same writer to do both of these things: confront the ugly and still search for beauty. Look squarely into the dead eyes of the mob bent on annihilation – and still hold on to a belief in the potential of masses of people to come together to change the world for the better.

Arundhati Roy is that rare writer. So, too, is Alaa Abd el-Fattah. I was not at all surprised when I learned that Roy had chosen Alaa as this year’s Writer of Courage. Though very different stylistically, their spirits are connected in an almost sibling-like way.

It was my honour to write the foreword to Alaa mind-altering book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. Having spent many weeks immersed in his writing, I would also have been happy to spend this short speech tonight praising Alaa’s work – pulling out the insights and sentences that are now permanent parts of my mental architecture.

I could speak to you about his warnings about nationalism, his devotion to participatory democracy, his bold experimentations with form and style. I could share some of the endlessly original ways he finds to express disdain for tyrants, liars and cowards (a trait he shares with Arundhati). I could talk about how rare it is for revolutionaries to look honestly at their own movement’s failures and missteps, which Alaa does with great rigour and care.

All of these qualities, along with his strategic mind and acute analysis of power, made him one of the most important figures the 2011 pro-democracy revolution in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that overthrew the three-decade rule of Hosni Mubarak. There is so much to say.

And yet as I sat down to write this appreciation, of both Arundhati and Alaa, it felt impossible to simply focus on their words – the books, essays and turns of phrase. Nor did it seem appropriate to focus on their impacts – the significance they hold to millions of people fighting for justice, liberation and dignified lives inside and outside their home countries.

I kept getting stuck on a simple fact. That, though their circumstances differ greatly, both Arundhati and Alaa are in danger. In fact, when English PEN invited me to deliver this encomium, the letter contained a caveat, one that should startle us: ‘Given the state of the world, and the targeting by governments of both Alaa and Arundhati, we’re aware that it’s possible that both will be able to join us in person, but also that neither will.’

Alaa should be with us tonight, having finished serving his latest, absurd, sentence twelve days ago. The British government should have used every bit of leverage that it has – and it plenty – to make sure that he was here. They clearly did not. Alaa has already lost more than a decade of his life to Egypt’s dungeons – an incarceration so prolonged, torturous and arbitrary that his mother, Laila Soueif, calls this latest extension ‘a kidnapping’.

Meanwhile, just as English PEN’s decision to award the Pinter Prize to Arundhati Roy was announced, reports came that she could face charges under India’s draconian anti-terrorism laws, with very severe implications for her freedom. That news led to a media frenzy, which put her in further danger, the kind of thing that has brought angry mobs to her door before.

Arundhati is here, thank goodness. But it’s a reminder that we cannot take any writer’s freedom or safety for granted, no matter how renowned or celebrated.

A huge part of what I cherish about Arundhati and Alaa is that, like the best public intellectuals, they help us understand our moment in history. This is hard: change is constant and mostly incremental; the big shifts tend to sneak up on us. So how do we know when we are in a new chapter, one that requires different things of us? We know, partly, because our writers tell us.

‘The pandemic is a portal’, Roy said, we’re going somewhere new. Pay attention.

Alaa, from jail, helped his comrades understand that the Tahrir revolutionary moment had passed, and new strategies were required. A defeat did not need to be the end of the story, but he knew that you can’t write a new chapter if you are stuck in the old one.

I point this out because I think that this night – when it was entirely possibly that neither of our honourees would be free enough to be with us – is telling us something important. I think it’s telling us that we have entered a new era. I think it’s telling us to pay close attention.

Arundhati and Alaa are famous writers so we know about their cases. But thousands of lesser- known activists, journalists, academics, and lawyers are currently imprisoned in India’s jails on draconian or entirely trumped-up charges. And those are the ones who have not been assassinated in the streets after being declared enemies of the state.

In Egypt, human rights group estimate that there are some 60,000 political prisoners behind bars. An unfathomable number, one that helps explain why building shiny new prisons is one of the current regime’s most successful enterprises.

In light of these facts, I want to underline something that can get lost in the apolitical discourse of human rights. Arundhati and Alaa are movement writers – writers whose voices are inseparable from the international resistance to the steamroller of corporate globalism and militarism that surged at the turn of the millennium. The movement looked different in every country, but before social media existed, we were connected to each other and we understood that we were fighting different fronts of the same struggle. From Chiapas to Palestine, Narmada to Genoa, Tahrir to Occupy Wall Street.

This was the other world that Arundhati could hear breathing on a quiet day, the worlds that were always there.

I point this out because the state repression and harassment that these two writers face cannot be pried apart from the repression of the movements they helped build and that built them. Nor can the repression of these movements be pried apart from the fascistic political forces that are currently rising globally to fill their vacuum. Filling it with hate-filled ideologies that feed off legitimate anger at elites but systematically redirect that anger towards the most vulnerable people in our respective societies. Particularly at the migrants who have been displaced by the wars, climate disasters and policies of economic immiseration that our global movements tried very hard to stop.

As multinational corporations rearranged India in their image, Roy described it as ‘the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged […] – the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world’s elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India.’

It’s not just India, of course. That successful succession is our world now. And a world like that needs a lot of jails. It needs all kinds of weapons. It needs iron domes – not just in Israel, but everywhere.

Writers with compulsions to tell the truth? Not so much. In fact, there is a special kind of pure, distilled hatred that fascists and tyrants reserve for the people who see them. Truly see them. Or rather, see through them.

And not only see through them but represent a true alternative to them – a politics built on love, solidarity and an open-armed embrace of the magnificence of our differences.

At English PEN, you know that writing is always dangerous business somewhere. That’s why you exist: to champion the pen over the gun and the prison cell. But as we honour these two writers who are both at escalating risk, from countries where the jails and morgues are crowded with other truth-tellers, we must contend with the reality that we have entered a brazen new stage of state violence.

And nowhere more so than in Palestine. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, the total number of journalists killed in Gaza in the past year has reached 176, with 32 journalists in prison.

Just a few days ago, an Israeli strike murdered the 19-year-old Palestinian journalist Hassan Hamad in his home in the Jabalia camp in North Gaza. His remains were reduced to a shoe box.

His colleagues shared a WhatsApp message he had received. It said: ‘Listen, If you continue spreading lies about Israel, we’ll come for you next […]. This is your last warning.’

Yesterday Israel shot and killed Al-Aqsa TV photojournalist Mohammed al-Tannani. Al Jazeera’s Fadi al-Wahdi was shot in the neck. Also yesterday.

So if you don’t mind, tonight’s encomium is for Arundhati, and for Alaa. But it is also for Hassan and Mohammed and Fadi and so many others who believed so fiercely in the power of witnessing that they risked everything to try to shake us into action.

None of this is safely over there. In North America, solidarity with Palestine is costing jobs and reputations. Students and professors calling for divestment have been brutalised on their own campuses. Climate activists in this country are getting multiyear sentences for trying to peacefully raise the alarm about the kind of cataclysmic storm that is bearing down on Florida as we meet. And just a few weeks ago, anti-migrant pogroms broke out in the streets of your major cities.

We are all inside this dangerous new chapter, connected to one another. There is fear in that, but there is strength too. It means there are many new alliances to make, new solidarities to forge, new strategies to devise. And new courage to find. Because as Alaa’s words remind us we ‘have not yet been defeated’.

The post Naomi Klein: An Encomium to Arundhati Roy and Alaa Abd el‑Fattah appeared first on English PEN.

I met Alaa for the first time at a protest calling for the independence of the judiciary in 2006. We were in our 20s. He was effervescently protesting with his whole body, jumping up and down like fire. Shortly after, he was pulled by several cops to a police truck. Judging from the scene, he seemed to be enacting a bodily resistance as he was dragged by the police. We always smile when we remember how our first physical encounter is one where his full presence is being actively negated by the police. We laugh at how unflattering the scene was for a first meeting.

Shortly after Alaa came out from his imprisonment, he had an idea. He wanted to convene an assemblage of inventive techies with a heightened sense of political consciousness. He was of the blogging generation and was on the forefront of it; but he was never content with sitting back to think on his own and perform to an invisible public from behind a computer screen. He wanted to go wider and deeper; wider by summoning a convention and deeper by interrogating the very techne through which a whole new politics of expression was emerging.

He wanted to test what it means to work with tech tools to open up channels of knowledge making, ideating and developing discourse. The quest was political, the façade technological, the approach philosophical. We convened techies from across the Arab World, who are also artists, organisers, writers and thinkers. It was our first encounter with how to think and organise intersectionally, with how to break categories open and smuggle their substance from one to the other; technology to politics, philosophy to technology, technology to art and journalism, and so on. You could say it was a kind of rehearsal for the Arab Spring, with our newborn community boasting members from Tunisia, Syria, Palestine, Bahrain and Lebanon among others.

When the Tunisian revolution erupted in December 2010, I was with Alaa in Pretoria, South Africa. He had then moved there to work with localisation software, a technology he was militant about; he wanted to see an Internet where Arabic content flowed seamlessly as though it was its native language; the Internet being, back then, a possible site for an embodied universality.

I cut my trip short to rush back home, get a visa and go to Tunisia – but the wave of Arab revolutions was moving faster than flights – and Egypt’s own revolution broke out on 25 January. I was beaten by the police, who broke my glasses. I wrote to Alaa that day about how he had missed an unflattering scene of me being beaten up and losing a shoe and, most importantly, my glasses – and my vision with them. But we agreed that something new was emerging in the blur.

A few days later, Alaa would pack and come back home; at the time, home was Tahrir Square. Days after, the president had fallen, the government had fallen, the parliament had fallen, the constitution had fallen. I met Alaa in Tahrir Square: he had a list on a draft paper that he was crossing out. Revolutionary change was a laundry list in Alaa’s hands. He was striking out items, and writing out new ones that now needed attention.

What comes next is yet another formidable presence, not confined to protest squares. Alaa went on working with different formations, students, activists, journalists, techies, artists. He taught workshops on how to write a political statement as a poetic act. He worked with youths on how to inhabit the formulaic informational space of Wikipedia with homegrown narratives. He led code sprints for localisation tools. He led meetings on how practicing politics online – as opposed to through the political party – had restored space for emotion.

Let’s Write Our Own Constitution – one of Alaa’s initiatives. He admired South Africa’s experience with the Freedom Charter, primarily for the process of assembling its content through the active instruction of the public to politicians. Rescuing democracy from its representational reductionism, he was dreaming of smuggling Kilptown’s democratic experiment to Egypt, where people, clustered in communities, would convene to write parts of a proposed new collective constitution. Its content inside, he had his eyes on how this form of convening, of coming together, would affect the outcome.

In the months to follow, there were many reversals to the revolutionary triumphalism that we experienced in the early days of 2011. But the ultimate reversal was in 2013: a military coup. By then, my newspaper’s management had decided to pull our funding – as an act of censorship. I became jobless alongside 25 journalists colleagues. I had an intuition that this was going to be the summer of unprecedented political violence and finitudes. I asked Alaa to help us build a website where we could house our displaced journalism, to at least bear witness to the coming summer of violence. He spent days and nights with his partner Manal back then, writing code for our new website. Meanwhile, I was diverting my anxiety about a starting our new project, a project that may stand in the face of the violent annihilation of our voices by playing with Khaled on Alaa and Manal’s couch, as both were busy writing code. Khaled, their son, was almost one by then; he was birthed in a moment of birthing, when the revolution was ascendant – and was now wrestling to make his way into so much uncertainty.

By the time our website, Mada, was up and running, the military was in power and Alaa was in prison. He finished developing our code in smuggled letters and instructions during prison visits. In the ten years that followed, there would be two active bodies of archives of the military’s violent cancelation of public politics: sustained publishing in Mada, and letters to and from Alaa.

Alaa’s handwriting in the letters is barely legible, and reading them is an exercise of deciphering. Sometimes I do it with a common friend, Sarah, who also sends and receives letters. The exercise reminds me of an eerie image described by Frantz Fanon from 1954 of Algerians trying to tune to the jammed transmission of the revolutionaries of Radio Free Algeria. We would start reading some of the letters together, it would turn into a spiritual ritual of some sort, where Alaa is summoned, and suddenly there is much more to the content we are reading. Such is the possibility of form that Alaa was always militant about.

Sometimes, the two archives of Mada and the letters would converge; Alaa’s first years of imprisonment were marked by a determination that a voice can transcend confinement and trespass. His body was incarcerated, but his voice was fugitive. With profound depth, the kind he is ordered to summon within a prison architecture, he wrote about failure as instruction, progress as ideology, Palestine as universal politics.

In his later years of imprisonment, Alaa’s writings shifted to his own predicament as a prisoner, again universalising it to urge a solidarity embodied in a belief that this concerns us all, that we too can be prisoners like him one day. Why? Because states ultimately survive through preserving their right to enact power on our bodies. In a text he wrote in 2019, he described with graphic precision a violent account of his incarceration. He did not do it to invite us to pity him, but to understand that the Authority’s enmity with its opponents is predicated on the negation of the voice and the body. This is a moment when the political failure of the collective has returned us to the body as an ultimate site of resistance.

In 2017 Alaa wrote, ‘I am in prison because the regime wants to make an example of us. So let us be an example but of our own choosing. Let us be an example, not a warning.’ Five years later, he went on his longest hunger strike to demand freedom, and escalated it to a water strike. He survives an imminent death in a moment he movingly describes in a letter. He is woken from unconsciousness to find himself in the arms of his cell mates, some looking at him with eyes terrified by yet another possible loss. Some held his head with care, others held his back. He put it in words and an image was born. Ordained to a jail cell with no exit in sight, Alaa restores his attachment to life through inmate solidarity, not just as his own particular condition, but as a reminder that unrestrained power is built on confinement. And that those in confinement must not to be bracketed off to a margin, a human rights category – they need to become the issue of all issues, the cause of all causes. And for this to happen, there needs to be solidarity.

Today, his mother, Laila Soueif, is on hunger strike for him. Today is Day 11, because 11 days ago, Alaa actually completed his latest prison sentence of five years, but still has not been released.

Sometime in the 1930s, Bertolt Brecht orated a speech to an anti-fascist gathering, in which he spoke about the courage of recognising the truth when it is hidden, the skill to turn it into something we can fight with, the cunning of finding in whose hands to put it and spread it. Through years of a friendship I am so privileged to have with Alaa, I witnessed his digging into origins like a philosopher, turning his findings into political artifacts for organising and mobilising like a politician, and then, essentially putting it all in our hands in codes, letters and articles like an orator.

Alaa’s is a friendship that unleashes political imagination He is a pedagogy that keeps giving, through words and silence. He is the ghost of spring past; he is the absentee we should all summon to presence.

Lina Attalah is a journalist and founding editor of Mada Masr, a Cairo-based independent media platform, where Alaa Abd el-Fattah published many of his writings.

Photo credit: George Torode

The post Lina Attalah’s Speech for Alaa Abd el-Fattah, 2024 PEN Pinter Prize Writer of Courage appeared first on English PEN.

I thank you, members of English PEN and members of the jury, for honouring me with the PEN Pinter Prize. I would like to begin by announcing the name of this year’s Writer of Courage who I have chosen to share this award with.

My greetings to you, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, writer of courage and my fellow awardee. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be freed yet. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison you wrote, ‘[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.’ We are listening, Alaa. Closely.

Greetings to you, too, my beloved Naomi Klein, friend to both Alaa and me. Thank you for being here tonight. It means the world to me.

Greetings to all of you gathered here, as well to as those who are invisible perhaps to this wonderful audience but as visible to me as anybody else in this room. I am speaking of my friends and comrades in prison in India – lawyers, academics, students, journalists – Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut. I speak to you, my friend Khurram Parvaiz, one of the most remarkable people I know, you’ve been in prison for three years, and to you too Irfan Mehraj and to the thousands incarcerated in Kashmir and across the country whose lives have been devastated.

When Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN and of the Pinter panel first wrote to me about this honour, she said the Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’. That is a quote from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

The word ‘unflinching’ made me pause for a moment, because I think of myself as someone who is almost permanently flinching.

I would like to dwell a little on the theme of ‘flinching’ and ‘unflinching’. Which may be best illustrated by Harold Pinter himself:

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Remember that President Reagan called the Contras ‘the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.’ A turn of phrase that he was clearly fond of. He also used it to describe the CIA-backed Afghan Mujahideen, who then morphed into the Taliban. And it is the Taliban who rule Afghanistan today after waging a twenty-year-long war against the US invasion and occupation. Before the Contras and the Mujahideen, there was the war in Vietnam and the unflinching US military doctrine that ordered its soldiers to ‘Kill Anything That Moves’. If you read the Pentagon Papers and other documents on US war aims in Vietnam, you can enjoy some lively unflinching discussions about how to commit genocide—is it better to kill people outright or to starve them slowly? Which would look better? The problem that the compassionate mandarins in the Pentagon faced was that, unlike Americans, who, according to them, want ‘life, happiness, wealth, power’, Asians ‘stoically accept […] the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives’—and force America to carry their ‘strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide.’ A terrible burden to be borne unflinchingly.

And here we are, all these years later, more than a year into yet another genocide. The US and Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon in defence of a colonial occupation and an Apartheid state. The death toll so far, is officially 42,000, a majority of them women and children. This does not include those who died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighbourhoods, whole cities, and those whose bodies have not yet been recovered. A recent study by Oxfam says that more children have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the last twenty years.

To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide – the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews – the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another.

Like every state that has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in history, Zionists in Israel – who believe themselves to be ‘the chosen people’ – began by dehumanising Palestinians before driving them off their land and murdering them.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians ‘two-legged beasts’, Yitzhak Rabin called them ‘grasshoppers’ who ‘could be crushed’ and Golda Meir said ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians’. Winston Churchill, that famous warrior against fascism, said, ‘I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time’ and then went on to declare that a ‘higher race’ had the final right to the manger. Once those two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, dogs and non-existent people were murdered, ethnically cleansed, and ghettoised, a new country was born. It was celebrated as a ‘land without people for people without a land’. The nuclear-armed state of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural wealth and resources of the Middle East for US and Europe. A lovely coincidence of aims and objectives.

The new state was supported unhesitatingly and unflinchingly, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed. It grew up like a protected child in a wealthy home whose parents smile proudly as it commits atrocity upon atrocity. No wonder today it feels free to boast openly about committing genocide. (At least The Pentagon Papers were secret. They had to be stolen. And leaked.) No wonder Israeli soldiers seem to have lost all sense of decency. No wonder they flood the social media with depraved videos of themselves wearing the lingerie of women they have killed or displaced, videos of themselves mimicking dying Palestinians and wounded children or raped and tortured prisoners, images of themselves blowing up buildings while they smoke cigarettes or jive to music on their headphones. Who are these people?

What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?

The answer, according to Israel and its allies, as well as the Western media, is the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7^th last year. The killing of Israeli civilians and the taking of Israeli hostages. According to them, history only began a year ago.

So, this is the part in my speech where I am expected to equivocate to protect myself, my ‘neutrality’, my intellectual standing. This is the part where I am meant to lapse into moral equivalence and condemn Hamas, the other militant groups in Gaza and their ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon, for killing civilians and taking people hostage. And to condemn the people of Gaza who celebrated the Hamas attack. Once that’s done it all becomes easy, doesn’t it? Ah well. Everybody is terrible, what can one do? Let’s go shopping instead…

I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.

When US President Joe Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet during a visit to Israel in October 2023, he said, ‘I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.’

Unlike President Joe Biden, who calls himself a non-Jewish Zionist and unflinchingly bankrolls and arms Israel while it commits its war crimes, I am not going to declare myself or define myself in any way that is narrower than my writing. I am what I write.

I am acutely aware that being the writer that I am, the non-Muslim that I am and the woman that I am, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible for me to survive very long under the rule of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime. But that is not the point here. The point is to educate ourselves about the history and the circumstances under which they came to exist. The point is that right now they are fighting against an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can go up against a genocidal war machine. Because, when all the powers of the world are against them, who do they have to turn to but God? I am aware that Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have vocal detractors in their own countries, some who also languish in jails or have faced far worse outcomes. I am aware that some of their actions – the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7^th by Hamas – constitute war crimes. However, there cannot be an equivalence between this and what Israel and the United States are doing in Gaza, in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. The root of all the violence, including the violence of October 7^th, is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its subjugation of the Palestinian people. History did not begin on 7 October 2023.

I ask you, which of us sitting in this hall would willingly submit to the indignity that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to for decades? What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromise have they not accepted – other than the one that requires them to crawl on their knees and eat dirt?

Israel is not fighting a war of self-defence. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.

Since October 7^th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator.

Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.

Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this. We have watched those marches of hundreds of thousands of people – including a young generation of Jews who are tired of being used, tired of being lied to. Who would have imagined that we would live to see the day when German police would arrest Jewish citizens for protesting against Israel and Zionism and accuse them of anti-Semitism? Who would have thought the US government would, in the service of the Israeli state, undermine its cardinal principle of Free Speech by banning pro-Palestine slogans? The so-called moral architecture of western democracies – with a few honourable exceptions – has become a grim laughingstock in the rest of the world.

When Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a map of the Middle East in which Palestine has been erased and Israel stretches from the river to the sea, he is applauded as a visionary who is working to realise the dream of a Jewish homeland.

But when Palestinians and their supporters chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, they are accused of explicitly calling for the genocide of Jews.

Are they really? Or is that a sick imagination projecting its own darkness onto others? An imagination that cannot countenance diversity, cannot countenance the idea of living in a country alongside other people, equally, with equal rights. Like everybody else in the world does. An imagination that cannot afford to acknowledge that Palestinians want to be free, like South Africa is, like India is, like all countries that have thrown off the yoke of colonialism are. Countries that are diverse, deeply, maybe even fatally, flawed, but free. When South Africans were chanting their popular rallying cry, Amandla! Power to the people, were they calling for the genocide of white people? They were not. They were calling for the dismantling of the Apartheid state. Just as the Palestinians are.

The war that has now begun will be terrible. But it will eventually dismantle Israeli Apartheid. The whole world will be far safer for everyone – including for Jewish people – and far more just. It will be like pulling an arrow from our wounded heart.

If the US government withdrew its support of Israel, the war could stop today. Hostilities could end right this minute. Israeli hostages could be freed, Palestinian prisoners could be released. The negotiations with Hamas and the other Palestinian stakeholders that must inevitably follow the war could instead take place now and prevent the suffering of millions of people. How sad that most people would consider this a naïve, laughable proposition.

As I conclude, let me turn to your words, Alaa Abd el-Fatah, from your book of prison writing, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat – and the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye. I have rarely seen writing in which a citizen separates himself from the state, from the generals and even from the slogans of the Square with such bell-like clarity.

The centre is treason because there’s room in it only for the General…. The centre is treason and I have never been a traitor. They think they’ve pushed us back into the margins. They don’t realise that we never left it, we just got lost for a brief while. Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams. We never sought the centre because it has no room except for those who abandon the dream. Even the square was not big enough for us, so most of the battles of the revolution happened outside it, and most of the heroes remained outside the frame.

As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day–

From the river to the sea

Palestine will be Free.

It will. Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock. That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time.

The post No Propaganda on Earth Can Hide the Wound that is Palestine: Arundhati Roy’s PEN Pinter Prize 2024 Speech appeared first on English PEN.

This question has always preoccupied my mind and remains more pressing than all other questions. They describe us as ‘survivors’ from oppression, tyranny, war and destruction, torture, drowning, hunger, scorching heat and extreme cold. But have we really survived? How do you define survival in the first place? Is it the mere fact of physically enduring, remaining alive as creatures that breathe and function biologically? Surely, if that is the case, the term to describe us should be ‘remained alive’ and not ‘survivors’.

Time passes in exile, but in exile the passage of time is different than in other places. It is almost as if it has a different formula, one that makes the hours unbearable and lingering, so that you feel that your entrapment in the maze of exile is endless, while simultaneously making you feel that your years have slipped away, passed you by while smiling and mocking you and your life.

Time in exile is not one block that either passes heavily or speeds by in a consistent manner. It does not allow you to adapt to it. No, time in exile is separate and, at times, contradictory blocks, each block with their own mood and rhythm that might contradict your wishes and desires. Place is also different in exile from how you once understood it – the ‘here’ and the ‘there’. My body is ‘here’ while my soul remains ‘there’. Physics is here, chemistry there. Sometimes you say ‘here’ to refer to ‘there’. Other times you may say ‘there’ while talking about ‘here’. An exceptionally vague dialectic, an interchangeable relation in which the two places end up intertwined to form a special maze that only exacerbates your maze of time and renders you unable to define your time or your place – welcome to exile!

So, as time passes in exile, you discover that those who died are the survivors and that we did not survive. A truth that contradicts everything you have heard all your life! But there’s a problem: though you have not survived, survivor guilt is consuming your heart; it is like paying for a sandwich to have it stolen from you before you’ve even had a bite. A guilt that makes your entire life in exile become dedicated to compensating for that guilt: I have stayed alive while many others perished! That thought will look you in the eye every morning when you look in a mirror. You will remind yourself then of that line the old man told Deigo in one of your favourite movies, Twice Born, as he suffers with survivor guilt after escaping the war: ‘It was easier to run to the grenades than walking on ruins’. ‘No! You are wrong!’ you would answer him. But then you would end by repeating his final words: ‘I am ashamed to belong to the human race. God will not forgive us!’

Later, when you walk into your kitchen, you will spot the paper with part of Apollinaire’s poem written on it, which was made into a song by Leo Ferre:

Under Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine
And our loves
Must it remind me
Joy has always come after pain

Under Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine
And our loves
Must it remind me
Joy has always come after pain

Let come the night, let ring the hours
Days go by, I remain

Love goes away like this flowing water
Love goes away
How slow life is
And how violent Hope is

Let come the night, let ring the hours
Days go by, I remain

Days pass, and weeks pass
Neither passed time
Nor loves come back
Under Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine

Can I call it the era of silence? – April 2016

You woke up one morning back in the early days of your exile. You felt lonely, and a new convection made it impossible for you to be able even to lift yourself out of bed: It was all in vain!

Nothing is important anymore, and all that once was has now collapsed into a bottomless abyss! Everything we dreamt of, everything we fought for, for which many of us lost our lives. Now our country lies in ruins, our bodies piling in the graveyard the Mediterranean has become, and many of us are scattered in countries of exile, some friendly and some hostile. Many remain stuck in the death camps, besieged by hatred. We are the plague of this new world, mere nobodies living in places that do not know us, no-ones living in times that betrayed us. Believe me, my friend, many of these haunting thoughts will race through your mind. They will even stick their tongue out, mocking you.

I have lost my ability to take action; our ability has been squandered, just like everything we ever lived for!

Many of us have found ourselves stuck in such a morning and not been able to overcome it till the moment of our suicide. Suicide, here, is not merely a physical action – not at all! Sometimes we commit suicide while we stay alive. Silence is the answer in such a case; in such a morning, silence is the cleverest solution possible.

Silence, on many occasions, is the most eloquent response possible.

Do you remember the quote from Judith Butler that we debated for a long time? ‘Nietzsche did well to understand that I begin my story of myself only in the face of a “you” who asks me to give an account. Only in the face of such a query or attribution from another – “Was it you?” – do any of us start to narrate ourselves, or find that, for urgent reasons, we must become self-narrating beings’

In exile, you will face this question on a daily basis: Who are you? And this very same question is the mirror, and the gentler version, of the description that would become synonymous to you: a nobody! But that is why, in reaction to this very point, I decided to adopt Butler’s response to this dilemma: I have the right to remain silent in the face of such a question! ‘The silence articulates a resistance to the question: “You have no right to ask such a question”, or “I will not dignify this allegation with a response” […] Silence in these instances either calls into question the legitimacy of the authority invoked by the question and the questioner or attempts to circumscribe a domain of autonomy that cannot or should not be intruded upon by the questioner’.

Okay then, this ‘domain of autonomy’ is the space in which we should contemplate the past events: Were we wrong? Was there a possibility for things to turn out differently? What shall we do in the future? And many, many more questions that you have asked yourself, and that I have asked myself, and that have remained without answers and might remain so in the future. Others have been asking themselves these questions for over a hundred years; yes, the French Paul Valery stood at the end of the First World War with his thick moustache and warned: ‘And yet the facts are clear and pitiless: thousands of young writers and young artists have died; the illusion of European culture has been lost, and knowledge has been proved impotent to save anything whatever; science is mortally wounded in its moral ambitions and, as it were, put to shame by the cruelty of its applications’.

Yes, that was true back then. But what about today? Well, nothing has changed; the shame has only became more shameful.

And so, faced with this existential moment and all these feelings of shame, absurdity, guilt, and lack of confidence, solitude becomes the only solution for this simultaneously private and public crisis of yours, the only possible choice that can help you reassess and search for answers. Solitude is a very dark place, and its darkness will allow you to see clearly, for light blinds the vision. Only then will you praise solitude as Paul Auster once did, where ‘solitude’ does not mean ‘lonely’, but rather indicates keeping to oneself, so that we do not have to see ourselves in the eyes of others, for what will we see if we were to watch ourselves in their eyes?

When two of the most fundamental factors of your self-perception in life are compromised – the homeland and the identity – and, as this duality once governed your life, you now do not belong to the ‘old’ homeland nor to the ‘new’ one, you are stuck in purgatory, a punished soul that doesn’t inhabit the earth anymore, nor can it reach the heavens.

Thus your most profound convictions are shaken, and nationality becomes intertwined with exile. Nationality is the affirmation of belonging to a place, its people and culture. The interaction between nationality and exile becomes similar to the dialectic between the slave and enslaver as defined by Hegel, where two opposites redefine, dictate, and reshape each other.

Solitude becomes a manifesto of the defeated in their attempt to overcome their defeat.

We and the other / the other and we – August 2021

Is it our ‘activated’ identities that lead us to fall into the trap of ‘otherness’? Maybe!

One of the many meanings of exile that we contemplated in our earlier discussions is that exile leads us continuously to scrutinise ourselves and our values in relation to the ‘other’, and to question to what extent we are truly democratic.

You said that we came from dictatorships who want everyone to accept that there is one political outlook – or else! From patriarchal, unilateral societies who want everyone to accept that there is only one acceptable social, gender and sexual identity – or else! That we descended from neighbouring cultures that suffer in accepting one another, cultures that want everyone to refuse to acknowledge ethnic, national and sectarian diversity – or else! And I agree with you to a degree: these authoritarian regimes have long worked to destroy the foundations of citizenship and undermine all political, civic, and cultural activism and dissent.  We hardly knew each other in Syria, a country as diverse as a mosaic; communities lived like isolated islands, ignorant of one another, while each harbouring an incredible number of unfair prejudices – at times even naive notions – towards one another. We were ruled by fear, and more fear, and only fear. We have struggled for democracy – we started a revolution for it, we sacrificed a great deal. But I wonder if we really ever understood the real meaning of democracy?

You said to me that we were simply unacquainted with democracy, and that this was normal after decades of repression – despite the fact that no one has the right to deny us our entitlement to live in democratic societies, just as all people of the world have that entitlement. But experiencing democracy in exile makes you question how truly democratic you are. Can you honestly say that your thinking, attitudes and behaviours are truly democratic? And, in the first place, are these countries of exile in which we now live true democracies that protect our rights?

The meaning of freedom in exile remains ambiguous, like the meaning of democracy. I can’t think of a better adjective to describe it. With time, you realise that personal liberties have expanded to take over all other rights and freedoms, marginalising all other liberties away from the centre of our activism and influence, and that ‘they’ do not own the truth as much as they do not own the forefront of freedoms and democracy. That is when you reach a disillusionment that there is no utopian place of democracy, freedom and truth, that such a place existed only in our perceptions, and that the meanings of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are vague and confused. You will say that I’m being pessimistic and prejudiced, and I would answer you by quoting Heraclitus: that while seeking truth, you should expect the unexpected; the path to truth is arduous and, if found, remains ambiguous.

Do you remember what Butler said about the Italian feminist Adriana Cavarero? That in Cavarero’s book Relating Narratives, ‘in stark contrast to the Nietzschean view that life is essentially bound up with destruction and suffering […] Cavarero claims the question of the “who” engages the possibility of altruism, […] argues that we are beings who are, of necessity, exposed to one another in our vulnerability and singularity and that our political situation consists in part in learning how best to handle – and to honour – this constant and necessary exposure. […] In her view, I am not, as it were, an interior subject, closed upon myself, solipsistic, posing questions of myself alone. I exist in an important sense for you, and by virtue of you. If I have lost the conditions of address, if I have no “you” to address, then I have lost “myself.” In her view, one can tell an autobiography only to another, and one can reference an “I” only in relation to a “you”: without the “you,” my own story becomes impossible’.

And because of that, and in an attempt to answer these questions, and during the time of solitude, trying to refigure my priority while sitting in the dark alone, thinking about the others that now steadily impose themselves into my life, and about my inner and external battles, all these roads converged into one main road, and the question was: Do I walk down this road, or do I quit?

Walk, I decided. Walk and follow your heart. For you will not find another guide through this maze but your heart.

And when I encountered a book that was recently published in France entitled Sororité, a collective work edited by Chloé Delaume, I felt that it contained a message for me. This book reminded me of who I am and helped me find myself, having lost me amid the storms and mazes of moving into exile. Yes, I am a part of a universal ‘sisterhood’, and yes, I am still capable of being influential and can remain so no matter where I move. Freedom is not just a practice; it is a way of thinking. Democracy is not just a practice but an ideology and set of values that are subject to change.

And that is how I made the decision to return to writing, and I shall tell you all about that in detail shortly. I mean, writing saved me from myself. I became deeply convinced that any debate about the intellectual and political structure of the ‘feminist movements of the third world’ should be focused on two issues: internal criticism of the dominant Western feminist movements among whom we now live in our exile (it is important here to point out that these do not at all constitute one bloc, in the same way that ‘we’ are not one bloc); and working to create independent feminist strategies for the movements of people of colour based on their cultural, historical and geographic characteristics. The first is a project aiming to analyse and deconstruct white complex hegemony, and the second is a project aiming to build and construct for the currently disjointed margins made of people of colour.

Intersections – there are many intersations! – February 2017

It is difficult for anyone to understand what Kimberlé Crenshaw meant exactly when she coined the term ‘intersectional feminism’ unless they are a ‘woman’ who is ‘of colour’ and ‘from the third world’ and now lives in the ‘white’ exile. I wonder if there is another woman who actually recalls the term every time she physically stands at a crossroads. It is, as I would imagine you would think, rather funny!

Being marginalised should not be considered a new experience for women like us, you once told me. You explained that I come from an Arab country ruled by dictatorship, social patriarchy, and religious powers that infiltrate social and political authorities; that’s a lot of forces marginalising me! Maybe that is true, but marginalisation in exile is a different experience.

Suffering marginalisation in your own country cannot undermine your solid awareness of your identity. It cannot, even slightly, influence the way you identify yourself, your place in your society and in life in general. On the contrary, marginalisation in your own country makes you hold on more insistently to the reasons that led to your marginalisation in the first place – maybe because you were accustomed to this marginalisation and have developed your own mechanisms to cope with it, or maybe because you believe that it was your home, and that no one in the whole wide world can take that from you, or maybe because your analytical tools have dissected all these intersections of powers that were marginalising you, and they stopped retaining any influence over your thinking anymore. It is just as Fernando Pessoa said in The Book of Disquiet: ‘The generation I belong to was born into a world where those with a brain as well as a heart couldn’t find any support. The destructive work of previous generations left us a world that offered no security in the religious sphere, no guidance in the moral sphere, and no tranquillity in the political sphere. We were born into the midst of metaphysical anguish, moral anxiety and political disquiet’.

This disquiet that we lived as marginalised men and women in our homeland was the main drive that formed our awareness, thoughts, ideology – simply all of our intellect. Marginalisation in exile is different; we have become the other, the ‘unknown’, who have come from ambiguous places. Even those who knew our homeland never considered it fit for living by European standards. You become the ‘stranger’ riddled with contradictions.

OK, I will tell you a personal experience as an example that might help explain my idea more clearly. A few years ago, I started teaching as an assistant professor at the German Orient Institute in the city of my residence, Hamburg. Although I am a descendant of the Arab culture, and I write in Arabic, in the institute I found my intellect marginalised. As a daughter of this culture, I was treated as less knowledgeable than the German orientalists. There was a simple message, every day: We know more about you than you know yourself, we understand your culture better than you do, we can even teach you about your society and history if you want!

You are met with prejudgements everywhere you go. The feeling is best expressed by Indian feminist Chandra Talpade Mohanty: ‘A homogeneous notion of the oppression of women as a group is assumed, which, in turn, produces the image of an “average third world woman”. This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being “third world” (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimised, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions’.

I suddenly found that I am now a part of one homogeneous and large bloc named ‘the women of the third world’, a bloc that is ‘helpless’, that is often described as comprising victims of certain social and economic systems, as victims of male violence, victims of colonisation, victims of the Arab family system, victims of economic developments and women’s roles in liberal development, and last, victims of Islamic jurisprudence. I often encountered bizarre questions laden with a sense of superiority: Are women educated in Syria? Do you use cars? Do you have airports? Do you have fridges?

So, is this what cultural marginalisation in exile means? This marginalisation has been discussed by Said and Bhabha and Spivak, and many other men and women of colour who lived in the white centre. You, as a refugee of colour in exile, are extremely dangerous, even though you might not be aware of that. You are the coloured point in the predominant white discourse; you question the certainty of the answers the orientalists have, and their convictions. You set the question of culture as expressed by Bhabha, because you split the white discourse and writing and question it. You are diverse; your writing is rich with the experiences of these men and women of colour and their suffering in their homelands and, at the same time, it invades and addresses the white centre it now inhabits.

In exile, and without any prior preparation, you find yourself part of the time and space inhabited by those who are exiled, banished, colonised, oppressed, deprived, the people of colour and the rest of the marginalised groups, whether this marginalisation is because of their race, gender, religion or class. That is when the attempt to marginalise you culturally starts, not just marginalising you according to the direct meaning of the word, but also symbolically. This would make you more capable and inclined to express solidarity with other people of colour, and maybe you will choose to march in demonstrations and protests for causes that were not part of your priorities before. Maybe you will start supporting Black Lives Matter. Perhaps you will passionately defend a woman who wears a hijab, who was discriminated against as a result of her hijab, despite the fact that you fought hard and long against religious powers infringing on personal and social rights.

This new cultural solidarity gives you a deep feeling of unity with the other margins, for the struggle is one, and it is against a capitalist white centre that perceives itself as ‘better’ and ‘more civilised’, more cultured, and with a superior knowledge of everything, including your culture and history. It works, even if subconsciously, to indoctrinate you with its beliefs, perspectives, convictions.

I know you will question if we will live the rest of our lives in this constant struggle. My answer is simple: No. In this white centre, there are many who share your opinions and convictions despite being, biologically, the descendants of this centre. And they will convince you that cultural hybridisation – this mixing of cultures and at times conflicting opinions and ideas, ideologies and convictions, persuasions and religions – is the bright face of the future, and would create the only cultural context upon with the entire post-colonial school of thoughts could agree.

And despite the fact that a lot has changed since the 1980s, I believe that the argument Anour Abdul Malek presented in Social Dialectics: Nation and Revolution remains relevant: that modern imperialism is dominant, and its ‘violence taken to a higher level than before – through fire and sword, but also through attempts to control hearts and minds. For its content is defined by the combined action of the military-industrial complex and the hegemonic cultural centres of the West. All of them founded on the advanced levels of development attained by the monopoly of the finance capital, and supported by the benefits of both the scientific and technological revolution and the second industrial revolution itself’.

And, thus, my conviction was becoming stronger every day that my writing – as a woman of colour who is the subject of many prejudices, marginalised and exiled – is the weapon I should never lay down, not even for a moment. That is what I will explain to you now.

In praise of gossiping – December 2017

OK, my dear. I have thought long about our last conversation and wanted to expand on it and explain my viewpoint further.

Let me say that literature is merely a profound expression of loss, as Lion Feuchtwanger said seventy years ago. Or maybe language is the only piece of the homeland that we carry with us no matter where we go, and maybe it is the remedy for our unbearable losses. I am deeply convinced that writing is a form of resistance, always has been and still is. Writing our memories is a resistance against diaspora and oblivion; documenting alternative narratives and memory is a political action and an ethical stance, writing for salvation.

I find myself grinning every time I remember this Andrea Dworkin quote: ‘Gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact’. I can see you smiling as you read the line! Gossiping and writing are one in essence: raising one’s voice. Which is why gossiping is also a form of resistance.

In an attempt to answer one of the most controversial questions of the post-colonial era – can the subaltern speak? – Gayatri Spivak, in her book of the same name, argues that the question of ‘woman’ seems most problematic in this context. Clearly, if you are poor, black (or of colour) and female, you get it in three ways. Here, you must recall our earlier discussion about intersectionality. This question will linger for a long while, and there have been varying answers to it so far. And thus, as subjects and identities are formulated against a background of patriarchal and imperialist systems, the perception of you as a woman becomes framed by a rather violent machine of a stereotypical image of a ‘third-world woman’ who remains stuck between tradition and modernity. This, my dear, is the first world, and it will spare no effort in convincing you that, as a woman of colour, it will rid you of your unfair and unjust culture. As a result, were you to say what might undermine that notion, your words would be belittled as gossip.

A woman of colour remains a subject and never becomes an I.

And that is what makes our alternative narratives important – not just our alternative narrative against the narrative of the tyrant regime in Syria, but also our narrative against anyone and everyone who makes us subjects and not selves. The victors/ the tyrants/ the mainstream always write the official history, a fact we have to accept. But who is to say that writing/ literature/ languages/ gossip isn’t the alternative, secretive history of people? They become our history, the history of the margins, that they try to obliviate in their official histories.

There will always be those who argue that we will never be objective in writing our histories. Or maybe, as Edward Said once said, that ‘while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever’. Perhaps that is true, but who says that writing needs to be objective in the first place? Is any writing completely objective? And how do you define objective? Bear in mind that modern, Western culture is, in big part, the production of exiles, immigrants and refugees. Like us!

The narrating self – the I – is the one that creates alternative narratives, and we are the narrating selves for our stories, busy weaving our past and planning our future. It’s remarkable that the bigger the sacrifices we make for a cause, the tighter we hold on to it because we want to give meaning to our sacrifices and the suffering we endured, just like a bereaved parent screams my child has not died in vain. In politics also, there is the syndrome of our kids did not die in vain! That is why we write, and we gossip.

In her book In The Company Of The Fire Thieves, Conversations With International Writers, Joumana Hadad wrote that “In a debate between Umberto Eco and Antonio Tabucchi about the role of the intellectuals at the beginning of Berlusconi’s rule, Eco wrote in a newspaper that intellectuals needed to keep their silence, for there had been a lot of noise and a large number of speakers. He added that intellectuals were not obliged to address political or general current affairs, using the following metaphor: an intellectual is like everyone else; if his apartment caught fire, he calls the fire brigade.

Tabucchi responded that, of course, he would call the fire brigade. But he would also try to understand whether an electrical circuit malfunction or arson had caused the fire, and that this is the role of an intellectual: to reveal more than authority declares.”

This is a good reason to write ‘there’, and it is a good reason to write ‘here’ as well.

Is it the paradigm of societies? – May 2018

A German man drinking his beer in a bar asked me where I was from. (Here, I do not intend any allegory. The man was German, and he was drinking beer in a bar.) When he realised I was an Arab from Syria, he said: ‘Well, you are a beautiful woman, but I am allergic to camel hair!’ and burst out laughing.

Well, I know what you would say, and the scores of questions you may have because of this highly offensive comment, and I only describe it as such to be polite. How do I compare to a camel? And why does being from Syria make me relate to a camel? Why would he think he could come anywhere near me? You are going to be upset when I tell you that I totally ignored him, looked at him, pitying his stupidity, and then continued my conversation with my friends as if he did not exist.

Did I tell you that I came to understand exile as the organic relationship with the other, a mirror for both your personal and collective consciousness and subconsciousness? Many of your old axioms stop being certain, and your perspective has been altered. Maybe because you now find yourself needing to explain yourself at every juncture; you have to explain to the ‘others’ about yourself, your society, your culture, your beliefs, and the most mundane details of your life. It is all alien to them, and you feel as if you are explaining yourself to yourself, as if you have to reidentify yourself before you can explain it to the other.  We are strangers, haunted by strange and ignorant questions.  We are all the same person, perceived with no differentiations between us: we are from an alien and backward place, a desert, where women do not work and men are controlling. It is the stereotype that exile has about us.

And thus, the issue of racism against foreigners starts preoccupying your mind and many of your conversations. And the foreigners are us. Many of us turn into masochists, hunting for news of events here or there to assert to ourselves that the other is racist and then say: ‘See, I told you, they hate us!’ Many even rejoice when confronted with racism, and the truth is that you do not need to search very hard to encounter racism. I always fail to understand why some rejoice when they prove they face racism. The prism we use to analyse racism is often misguided and blinded; we always fail to acknowledge our racism against others as well. I can almost hear you crying out in objection: ‘Us? Us!’ And I would answer that racism is not one coherent block. It is multiple, multi-layered, and variable in complexity.

Zygmunt Bauman writes about Pierre-André Taguieff: ‘In his impressively erudite study of prejudice, […] Taguieff writes synonymically of racism and heterophobia (resentment of the different). Both appear, he avers, ‘on three levels’, or in three forms distinguished by the rising level of sophistication. The ‘primary racism’ is in his view universal. It is a natural reaction to the presence of an unknown stranger […]. Invariably, the first response to strangeness is antipathy, whichmore often than not leads to aggressiveness. Universality goes hand-in-hand with spontaneity. The primary racism needs no inspiring or fomenting, nor does it need a theory to legitimize the elemental hatred- though it can be on occasion, deliberately beefed up and deployed as an instrument of political mobilisation. At such time, it can be lifted to another level of complexity and turn into a ‘secondary’ (or rationalised) racism. This transformation happens when a theory is supplied (and internalised) that provides logical foundations for resentment. The repelling Other is represented as ill-willed or objectively harmful, in either case threatening the well-being of the resenting group.   […]. Finally, ‘tertiary’, or mystrifactory, racism which presupposes the two ‘lower’ levels, is distinguished by the deployment of a quasi-biological argument.”

Do you think, my dear, that we are inflicted with primary racism? This question has been pressing for a while now.

So, let us remember our lives together and ask: was it racist that we mocked the accent of the Turkmens and Armenians who lived among us when they spoke Arabic? Did our facial expressions resemble the sarcastic and amused expressions we are met with when we speak German? Was it racist that the religious rituals and practices of many minority sects were often ridiculed? And what about our insults against the dark-skinned Arab tribesmen in Syria? Was that racist? Was it racist for the urban townspeople to look down at the villagers? We have to admit that all of these were forms of primary racism that occur ‘naturally’ and are hidden. Still, this racism never led to racist actions or behaviours between the various classes and ethnicities of the Syrian people, and there was never a structured racism that built a deep resentment of the other. We were truly one people, but there were internalised feelings of suspicion and ‘otherness’ and, at times, even ‘apprehensive fear’ of one another: the majority Arabs were apprehensive of the other ethnicities; the Muslims were apprehensive of the other religions; straight people were apprehensive of queer people; the Sunnis were apprehensive of the other sects; and the opposites were also true. The political camps of regime loyalists and regime opponents were also afraid of one another.

We were shocked by the naked expressions of racism in the ‘here’. Racism in exile surpassed the first level into the second (the other as harmful), and at times, and this is where the danger is, to the third (‘a quasi-biological argument’). Is it because we are defeated in this ‘here’, broken and full of trauma, and have been thrown out to a strange land with a strange culture that we now have to call our “here”?

OK then. No matter what your answers are, racism remains the everlasting disease humanity has suffered over the ages. We could expand on the subject for hours and hours. It is the irrational fear of foreigners, xenophobia, and it is the belief that one’s own race, people and culture are superior to others, ethnocentrism. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that the primal problem of humanity, the root of many social disasters, is the notion of superiority; that a certain people are superior to others, that a certain human being is superior to others, and that a certain group is superior to the rest. Thus, superiority becomes a deep-rooted and generalised ideology in the consciousnesses of different peoples, the paradigms of societies, the cornerstones of their perception of the world.

I spend a long time contemplating the levels of racism people exercise in the ‘here’ and the ‘there’.

Final note: holding the embers with bare hands! – June 2023

I came to visit, but you were not there. I felt I had many urgent things to tell you!

Edward Said quoted Hugo of Saint Victor, the twelfth-century Augustinian mystic: ‘The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land’. I will never stop contemplating this quote, for the question of belonging is one of the most challenging questions I face in exile. Does it mean we kill our feeling of belonging to a certain place on this earth and we then belong to all the places? Does it mean that places are mere geographic locations and that belonging should be to a shared memory, people, culture, or even an idea? Then, memory could become a homeland, culture could become a homeland, ideas could become homelands.

Do not ever allow anyone to dictate to you what your belonging is!

And despite the fact, as I have told you before, that I consider myself part of the third wave of feminism – a wave that is extremely diverse with the writing of people of colour – despite its uniqueness, it remains part of the wider international movement. It is similar to what Henry James referred to in ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, published in 1896: that a literary work is like a small motif in a carpet, one of scores of others that makes the design of the carpet, and the carpet is the international literary scene. The beauty of the entire carpet starts with the beauty of each individual literary work, as a unique expression of its culture, and as part of the wider international literary scene. The literary work is a motif that completes and interacts with the other motifs.

So, it is the third wave of feminism, as Sara Gamble described it – or the ‘final wave’, as some critics of feminism named it to describe developments that took place during the ‘fourth wave’ of feminism, or what some have dubbed ‘post-feminism’. The majority of Arab feminist activism falls under the last category. However, there are generations of feminists who would rather be identified as a continuation of the former waves, and not be dubbed post-feminists, because they believe the term undermines feminism and portrays it as an obsolete notion. There are so many names, terms and identifications with which you and I might identify or not. What matters is that we should never consider any thought or ideology sacred.

Do not ever allow anyone to dictate to you what your ideologies and beliefs are, either.

And despite the fact that some consider the third and fourth waves of feminism to be short-lived trends, the vast geographical areas in which they have been influential invalidate such arguments. Both waves have been active and influential in many marginalised communities and communities of colour, including many third-world societies and Arab communities far from the white centres where the concept of feminism emerged and was developed by consecutive generations.

These waves’ work attempted to adapt to the unique characteristics of each of the societies in which they were active. Many who were part of these waves started believing that our freedom is not merely to copy the experiences of others, but to try to adapt the concepts of feminism to our own experiences, beliefs, and principles. As a result, we mixed feminist activism with political, creative, economic, and cultural activism and awareness-building.

Do not ever allow anyone to dictate to you what your questions are, nor their timing!

However, political activism in third-world societies is an integral part of feminist work in these societies, whether as direct or indirect action. Considering we have lost the ability to engage in direct political action and activism in our society, let us resort to political activism through creative works whose aim is to build an awareness that can lead to change. These are the embers I chose to hold on to with bare hands: addressing politics through creative writing is an identity and belonging for me, and I rely in my writing on true experiences, the same as many third-world feminists do. This writing is an effective way to break the silence, to give a voice to those who otherwise are voiceless, to raise awareness. Writing the testimonies of women, their experiences of repression and persecution, teaches other women about it all. Women become the mirror of women, and the margins become the mirror of other margins.

Do not ever allow anyone to undermine your belief in your power, the power of the margin, nor in your efficiency, the efficiency of the margin amid the societies of the mainstream.

Choose to belong to humanity ethically, to feminism culturally, to the margin of people of colour ethnically, to be active and critical socially, and to rebel intellectually. You are now holding the embers with your bare hands, and you know very well the price the subaltern pays when she chooses to speak out loud.

Finally, stay strong, my friend. I hope we meet again soon.

Rosa

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