You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

Prominent Authors Turn Down Prestigious PEN World Voices Festival over Org’s Response to Gaza

HeadlineMar 15, 2024

In more protest news, prominent writers including Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, Hisham Matar, Isabella Hammad and Zaina Arafat announced they will not participate in this year’s PEN World Voices Festival for failing to appropriately respond to Israel’s “cultural genocide” in Gaza. The authors write, “Israel has also killed nearly 100 academics and writers. If organizations like PEN America cling to the illusion of political neutrality in the face of a clear effort to destroy Palestinian lives and culture, one can only wonder whether there will be any writers left in Gaza to tell the story of their apocalypse, or to trust words and speech, when the killing finally ends. Or any record left of the history they have lived.”

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top