• Coffee Corner

    Coffee Corner

    Bushra al-Maqtari on how Sana’a, Yemen, has changed. Translated by Sawad Hussain.

  • Way to an unknown world

    ​Krys Lee reports for PEN Atlas from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where she appeared on the panel ‘New American Voices’. For even more on the festival, please see Daniel Hahn’s piece

  • Scottish Translation

    Sold-out translation duels, ninjas versus saints… Daniel Hahn reports from Edinburgh for PEN Atlas

  • Why we keep going

    In this week’s PEN Atlas, Lydia Cacho writes about the post-traumatic stress of being a persecuted journalist and the media’s appetite for titillation rather than indignation

  • Lydia Cacho has gone

    Sanjuana Martinez pays tribute to her friend and colleague Lydia Cacho who has been forced to flee Mexico

  • Roots of Corruption: the perils of free expression in Azerbaijan

    Azerbaijani writer and dissident Emin Milli discusses the power – and corruption – of words

  • History and hysteria: The private libraries of dictators

    Gazmend Kapllani on the books that were damned and banned during the communist regime in Albania for PEN Atlas

  • Grammar and Glamour: On Translating Diego Marani’s New Finnish Grammar

    ​Following our previous PEN Atlas piece by Diego Marani, his English translator Judith Landry talks us through the strange music of Finnish and translation as walking a tight-rope

  • Worlds apart: Russia online and offline

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece, Arkady Babchenko writes on freedom of speech, media and the internet in Russia

  • Translation as a Creative Process

    In this week’s PEN Atlas piece, award-winning Italian writer and European Commission official Diego Marani considers the role of the author in the translation process.

  • Women Writers, Part I

    PEN Atlas contributor Krys Lee considers the impact of Kyung-sook Shin’s Man Asian Literary Prize win and where Korean women writers stand today

  • Memories put in mothballs

    In his second despatch for the PEN Atlas, Athens’s based Gazmend Kapllani looks back to the Greek Civil War and considers what effect Civil War has had on the nation’s literature

  • How international is poetry?

    When the projection fails during the Finnish poet Olli Heikkonen’s reading and the slides with parallel Dutch and English translations disappear from the stage, poetry suddenly doesn’t seem that international anymore.

  • The Debut Generation

    In Soviet times there was a concept known as ‘young writers’. It was in fact a class concept. A budding writer was expected to descend from the working class and to glorify the Soviet regime. All facilities were provided for this purpose, such as the Gorki Literary Institute, founded to teach workers creative writing.

  • Bodies not corpses

    When I was asked to write this blog, the first option immediately suggested to me as a possible topic was that of the literature about the violence in Mexico. I have to confess that my first reaction was to refuse and get defensive

  • Selma Dabbagh reports from the Palestine Festival of Literature: Part 3

    In her third PEN Atlas despatch, British Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh reflects on Palfest, dealing with criticism, and what freedom feels like

  • Selma Dabbagh reports from the Palestine Festival of Literature: Part 2

    In this second PEN Atlas despatch from British Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh, we are taken deeper into Gaza; into the streets, into darkness

  • Selma Dabbagh reports from the Palestine Festival of Literature: Part 1

    This week the PEN Atlas hears from Selma Dabbagh at the Palestine Festival of Literature.

  • Endangered Species

    This week’s PEN Atlas despatch is from Dubravka Ugresic who considers a very specific human species and its survival; the writer.

  • Great Flemish Voices: Louis Paul Boon and Beyond

    In this week’s PEN Atlas despatch editor and translator Michele Hutchinson introduces some of the greatest Flemish writers…

  • Contra la narcoliteratura

    Contra la narcoliteraturaLa narrativa de la violencia en México 2: tres razones para no usar la palabra narcoliteratura