Articles

"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."

"Four poems from the poetry collection "Ópalo Negro" (2025), by a young Cuban poet exiled in Greece, built around a question wider than exile alone: what remains of us—family, memory, love, identity—when so much else is taken or left behind, and what we manage to rebuild."

"I am standing here to share my story, but in truth, it is the story of a war-torn country. It is the story of young people who watched their dreams vanish into the rubble of destruction. But most importantly, it is the story of vulnerable, yet incredibly resilient communities."

"Time for Indigenous peoples is not linear. It is an overlapping spiral where the past, present and future are happening all at once. It is called the Everywhen. Indigenous writers can imagine the apocalypse because our Ancestors lived through it."

"Former Pussy Riot member Olga Borisova explains to Index on Censorship how she became a political dissident."

"Cambodia is experiencing peace. Its land, once scarred by war—from the Cold War and the Vietnam War to its own civil conflicts—still carries the weight of history. Shaken once again by wars elsewhere, including conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, Cambodian contemporary artists have transformed remnants of violence in response."

"It is impossible not to rebel against such an injustice being done to someone who loves life and living as much as you do dad. But I am no longer rebelling; I am being patient. Because in this struggle, I know that in the end, the good will prevail."