PEN Sydney - News

Hours after the Chinese Communist Party proposed a constitutional change last month to lift presidential term limits, any words or phrases that remotely suggested President Xi Jingping was seeking a life term were blocked from social media. Censors targeted everything from Emperor Xi, The Emperor’s Dream, and Dream of Returning to the Great Qing, to Winnie the Pooh, a reference to Xi’s apparent resemblance to the cartoon character, the China Digital Times reported.

Award-winning novelist Melissa Lucashenko will deliver the next PEN Free Voices address on the Day of the Imprisoned Writer on November 15.

Behrouz Boochani, 35, is a Kurdish journalist, poet and film producer. On his second attempt to make a boat crossing from Indonesia to Australia he was intercepted, detained on Christmas Island and after one month was transferred to the Manus Island detention centre in August 2013 where he remains. This is his latest report from detention. 

Mark Isaacs, author of The Undesirables: Inside Nauru and Nauru Burning, was commissioned to visit Manus Island last November by the Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin as part of an anthology for the ‘State of Refugees’ project. 

This article is adapted from an essay he wrote for Foreign Policy.

In her Free Voices address on the 2017 Day of The Imprisoned Writer, award-winning cartoonist Cathy Wilcox looked at the ways in which cartoonists suffer and are punished, imprisoned and even killed for speaking out and drawing truths that the powerful – or fanatical - would rather not be seen. 

It has been eight years since producer Charlotte Mars and director Maya Newell began making Gayby Baby, an award-winning feature documentary starring four young people whose parents are gay. Hindsight got Maya Newell thinking. Certainly, the film caused a stir and got people talking, but what change did it make?