The New York Times reports that China barred three writers from joining the Independent Chinese PEN Center’s 10th anniversary celebration in Hong Kong last week. Larry Siems discovered the same treatment during PEN’s trip to Beijing the week before.
“Structures that will withstand time.” Ben Mirov begins a stint as guest poetry editor for PEN this week. He joins us for a reading and conversation about his work.
Rising Voices discovers that Twitter has become a useful tool for preserving minority and indigenous languages across a broad spectrum of communities.
“This country is made of fear.” The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting follows opposition writers and artists to a few [semi-]safe havens in Minsk, where a single letter of the Belarusian alphabet becomes a “kind of middle finger to state authorities.”
Our friends at Swedish PEN launch The Dissident Blog, which publishes essays by writers, journalists, and bloggers deemed “too dangerous to be read” in their home countries.
Faulkner at Virginia houses a wealth of resources—audio recordings, transcripts, essays, photos, and more—from William Faulkner’s two terms as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia from 1957–58.
Robert McCrum of the Guardian asks whether it’s time to start compensating authors for stuffing the coffers of big-name literary festivals.
