Amplifying brave,
young voices worldwide

"The writers featured in this collection belong to the same generation with remarkably diverse voices. When read together, they reveal a shared landscape: a region where identity is constantly negotiated, where memory resists erasure, where loss becomes language, and where literature remains one of the last spaces in which human experience can be examined without simplification."

"When Syrians found themselves with neither the financial means nor the space in their suitcases to carry their homes, their friends, or the countless memories they had left behind, they learned to distil their grief into spices and beloved dishes. Their tears became recipes, their longing became flavour."

"Egypt must be shown as she truly is— Egypt, in truth, is nothing but an image. He filled his poetry with the history of the prison, recorded hunger, and pain, losing, and loss. Our people are the ram, gathered above it, beasts and hyenas. Inside the prison, lions — envied the free."

"A fence around the cemetery? Are they afraid the dead might escape?"

"The authorities use their subservient press to act as intelligence agents, feeding private information about individuals in order to silence and exact revenge upon them. Not content with hurling the most vile insults at me, they have also branded me with medieval stigmas to discredit me in their war against a just cause, a cause whose horrors and whose pain I have carried on my own shoulders, without ever once stepping back."

"Egyptian poet and lyricist Galal El-Behairy has now spent over five years in prison. PEN International is deeply concerned over his health condition as he pursued a hunger strike to protest his unfair imprisonment. We hold the Egyptian authorities responsible for his physical and psychological health and well-being."

"They built us a roofless house  our leaders called it national unity,  so that it fell upon each of us  to supply the meat and bone"

"Life is nothing but a distance travelled towards erasure."

"somewhere behind the gunfire.  I reached out my hands  the way believing women reach out,  the way sorceresses do,  the way mothers reach out, giving birth beneath a tree."

"He lit a cigarette. Sat. Watched the fire withdraw, and the smoke surrender at last to ash thick with gunpowder. Then, he climbed again."

"It slipped further, time, when I admitted great disappointment, and gave myself over to hatred... Time was slipping away... but I was faster— I had already fled, before fleeing I severed my own peace, fed it to the wind, hoping some other city might catch a fever, when it notices my wounds"

"Where are your stones, the stones we used to pray on? Where have the birthdays gone? Who will carry this weight for us now?"

"When a mafia boss died, Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project's photo editor Erika Di Benedetto received a surprising call that revived childhood memories and helped her understand how the past weighs on the present for her father."

"Two poems from a young poet and writer from Gaza: "And so I wear this coat sewn out of place and time,  a silent pact, both prison and sublime.""

"I survived; I know this to be a fact. Still, there are moments when survival feels too simple a word for the distance between the life I was certain would end and the one I suddenly found myself continuing. Sometimes I cannot tell whether I came close to death and lived, or whether some part of me crossed into it and was sent back."

"Born in Bashkortostan and raised between languages and identities, Gulnaz confronts what it means to be Russian in a country that has long demanded its minorities become something else: "There is no such thing as a pure identity, least of all in a country where it is rewritten several times a century. All of it has already soaked into me, and I'm not going to pick any of it out."

"Five years after the Taliban’s return to power, Roya reflects on breaking the silence imposed on her. Once an engineering student dreaming of designing Afghanistan’s first skyscraper, now confined to her home, literature becomes a place where imagination resists prohibition and women’s voices endure despite all attempts to silence them."

"Kurdish poet and journalist Nedim Türfent spent more than six years in prison for his journalistic work. To PEN/Opp Magazine, he described life behind bars and how letters, solidarity and literature kept him alive."