'I was locked in my cell 23 hours a day, and I had no choice but to do what I loved. I wasn’t going to let the system take my creativity from me.'
Today in #PENTransmissions, Hannah Branston and Ade Adedeji on art and activism.
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'I had imagined today many times, since February 29 became mama’s day of leaving. I had been afraid of looking for a twenty-ninth day and not finding one.'
Today in #PENTransmissions, @jasmine-hongyu.bsky.social on precious memories with her mother.
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‘This was a major concern while creating the book: how to write about the violence without reproducing it.’
In #PENTransmissions, Michelle Steinbeck and Jen Calleja on fascism, femicide, and ghosts.
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‘I think of memory as finite. It’s personal. Once you’re gone, that memory goes with you. Myth, by contrast, lives beyond you.’
Today in #PENTransmissions, Vaddey Ratner on memory, narrative history, and storytelling as a means of survival.
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‘The cafés have become ruins, victims of widespread destruction, destruction that you can smell and touch.’
Today in #PENTransmissions, Bushra al-Maqtari on how Sana’a, Yemen, has changed. Translated by Sawad Hussain.
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'Gosh, this is difficult – it’s so difficult to try and explain something that has lasted 40 years.'
In #PENTransmissions, Solvej Balle on time, morality, and searching.
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'Faith, though often unfashionable in the arts, emerges in Aboulela’s work not as an oppressor, but as a source of solace – a well of deep knowing.'
In #PENTransmissions, Sabrina Mahfouz’s encomium for #PENPinterPrize 2025 winner Leila Aboulela.
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'I want to remove the fingers of accusation that are always directed at others, and instead hold up a mirror. Because at some point the other becomes the self.'
Stella Gaitano’s #PENPinterPrize Writer of Courage 2025 speech is now in #PENTransmissions.
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‘Without justice, the balance of the world is undone. Justice is the gravity keeping us upright as humans.’
Leila Aboulela’s #PENPinterPrize 2025 speech – delivered at the @britishlibrary.bsky.social – is now in our online magazine, #PENTransmissions.
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‘Or maybe a story that’s entirely different, fighting for its own space, its right to exist. Like a series of concentric circles fighting to stay whole’
In #PENTransmissions, Hajera Khaja on telling her friend’s story. w/ @pencanada.bsky.social.
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'What if I could give words to this strange, unmoored sense of belonging – of belonging nowhere and also anywhere?'
In #PENTransmissions, Deepa Rajagopalan on creating space at the centre. In partnership with @pencanada.bsky.social.
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'I am finding with every artefact I encounter that the call of these women is only amplified by their absence.'
In #PENTransmissions, Em Dial on archives and invitations of silence. w/ @pencanada.bsky.social.
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'These imaginaries float between fact and speculation, uncorroborated stories pieced together from bits and pieces that approximate and become a personal history.'
In #PENTransmissions, Christine Wu on reimagining family history. w/ @pencanada.bsky.social.
pentransmissions.com/2025/09/12/s...
'There was no Kurdish issue; there was a terrorism issue. A place called Kurdistan had never existed.’
Today in #PENTransmissions, Nurcan Baysal on Kurdish language, culture and identity. Translated by Nazım Dikbas.
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'The children look too. There is no point in hiding anything from us anymore. When I see the photo from the morgue, the wild animal inside me howls.'
In #PENTransmissions, Magdalena Blažević on the massacre of Kiseljak.
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'It’s hard to salvage belief in a world you have become acquainted with through violence, and even harder to think it can be saved.'
In #PENTransmissions, Jordan Aitcheson-Labarr on viewing a turbulent world through Hip Hop.
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‘How is our art ever to be free of political passions when everything we have to be passionate about [...] is so tied up in politics.’
Kamila Shamsie’s 2025 #PENLecture is now available to read in #PENTransmissions. ⤵️
pentransmissions.com/2025/06/27/r... @kshams.bsky.social
‘I watched the news as I ate. I watched the news as I tried to study. I was cooking lunch – pasta – when something exploded in the distance.’
Today in #PENTransmissions, Sana – a pseudonym – writes from Iran.
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'How many generations does it take for a culture to become native? For the tattoos of names and labels to set in blood, for postures to solidify in bones?'
In #PENTransmissions, Kamran Sajid on Panjabi folk music – part of our series, Young Voices.
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‘If one person or a small group of people can claim special access to the world beyond the veil, a hierarchy necessarily emerges. It’s only a few steps away from dictatorship.’
In #PENTransmissions, Raphael Cormack in conversation with Rana Haddad.
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‘And yet it seems to me that there is an invisible connection between me and those who write to me without expecting a reply.’
In #PENTransmissions, Nobel Laureate Ales Bialiatski on letters, solidarity, and compassion. Translated by Valzhyna Mort.
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'I think I just am a writer, and I have to carry on writing while words make sense.'
This week in #PENTransmissions: Jacqueline Wilson on letters, empathy and book bans.
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'I think I just am a writer, and I have to carry on writing while words make sense.'
In #PENTransmissions, Jacqueline Wilson on letters, empathy, book bans.
pentransmissions.com/2025/03/20/i...
'The moment in which we fail to feel outrage at genocide is the moment in which there will be no reason for poetry to exist'
In #PENTransmissions, @susannahdickey.bsky.social on the true crime media engine, Palestine, grief and the PEN Heaney Prize.
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'And I see us working to preserve our memories, so that we don’t forget what happened, and learning to see past the holes in our buildings and ourselves.'
In #PENTransmissions, Tetyana Teren on time in London with Victoria Amelina (tr. Larissa Babij).
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