In this issue of PEN Transmissions, we investigate secrets: the personal, the weird, and everything in between.
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Editorial: writing the past
We asked four writers to reflect on different aspects of how they write the past: from personal history to a country’s official past…
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Against the ignorant sun
The first gay couple I ever saw in real life was a pair of Dutch film festival co-directors who visited Pasar Rawalumbu, a market where my mother ran a kiosk selling clothes.
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The past is a dimension of the present: a conversation with Javier Cercas
‘I’m not interested in history itself. I’m interested in the past that has not passed.’
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If Gaza were a story
It dawned on me that the people around me needed a serious antidote to the historical amnesia that had taken hold of them…
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The past and the present side by side: a conversation with Peter Kimani
I am contesting the validity of history as we know it, because what is recorded is never told from the perspective of the victim, it is always the victor.
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On the move: Olga Tokarczuk
The concept of a ‘nation’ doesn’t have the power to describe the contemporary identity of people living in the world. We should look for other ideas to describe us as a collective, as a group, as a society.
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