Write Against Impunity

by    /  November 23, 2013  / No comments

Latin American Authors Commemorate their Murdered Colleagues

Write Against Impunity is a protest. A protest against the culture of impunity that prevails across Latin America. In countries such as Mexico, Honduras and Brazil, the rate at which writers, bloggers and journalists are being killed on account of their work is close to that of a war zone.

During the summer of 2012 PEN International and its worldwide community of Centres put out a call for submissions towards a literary protest. Texts received — including contributions from Claribel Alegría, Homero Aridjis, Gioconda Belli, Lydia Cacho, Ariel Dorfman, José Emilio Pacheco, Elena Poniatowska, Sergio Ramírez, Gloria Guardia, Carmen Boullosa, Victor Terán and Luisa Valenzuela — were initially published online in time for the Day of the Dead and the International Day to End Impunity.

The resulting collection, Write Against Impunity, is deliberately diverse. Contributions vary considerably in style and approach; but the poems, stories and essays, when placed alongside each other, form a chorus in solidarity with writers and journalists under attack in Latin America.

Write Against Impunity, published bilingually in Spanish and English, is the second publication of the PEN International Publishers Circle Series. The Publishers Circle is a group of 17 of the world’s leading publishers who support the work of PEN International.

Praise for Write Against Impunity:

‘The huge interest in and support for this campaign, and the fact that writers the calibre of Luisa Valenzuela, Sergio Ramírez, Gioconda Belli and Ariel Dorfman have contributed… only serves to highlight the seriousness of the situation of impunity in today’s Latin America—a region that has become a vast burial ground for writers and journalist.’ —The Huffington Post

To order a copy of Write Against Impunity click here.

For further information please contact Literary Manager, James Tennant: james.tennant@pen-international.org

This article was originally published by PEN International.

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