Our editorial on the Digital English PEN Literary Salon – interviews with writers who were due to appear at the 2020 London Book Fair.
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The Librarian Would Give You a Lock-down Extension: An Interview with Chen Qiufan
Chen Quifan – also known as Stanley Chan – discusses Shanghai, speculative fiction, AI, and threats to humanity.
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Zoonotic
South African writer Henrietta Rose-Innes writes on lockdown in Cape Town, and spider bites.
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Plague Diary: A Week
Three days from a week of Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares’s coronavirus diary.
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Standing with Hong Kong: An Interview with Joshua Wong and Jason Y. Ng
Joshua Wong and Jason Y. Ng, authors of Unfree Speech, discuss free speech in Hong Kong, coronavirus, and the role of literature in campaigning for global democracy.
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Editorial: Transmissions in the Time of Coronavirus
Read about changes to PEN Transmissions during our current crisis.
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How to Quarantine a Revolution
Lebanese writer and actress Dima Mikhayel Matta writes on quarantine, revolution, and being queer in Beirut.
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Silence, Our Noisy Silence: A Conversation with Sema Kaygusuz and Nicholas Glastonbury
Sema Kaygusuz and Nicholas Glastonbury discuss shame, representation and the Turkish language.
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Who Gets to Write What?
Ananda Devi writes on Mauritius and London, the purpose of fiction, and appearing to tread dark territories.
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Where Should They Throw Us? An Interview with Rodaan Al Galidi
Iraqi-Dutch novelist speaks to us about writing the asylum process, language and the value of humour.
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Free Music
Iranian musician Mehdi Rajabian writes on his time in Evin Prison, and music as a form of resistance in the Middle East.
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Translating Ulysses for Iran
Iranian-Canadian novelist and translator Akram Pedramnia writes on translating James Joyce into Persian, evading the censors, and imperial co-option of resistance.
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With this Novel, I Return: An Interview with Rafik Schami
Syrian-German novelist Rafik Schami discusses liberty, storytelling, language and exile.
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Always Against the Idols: A Conversation with Chus Pato and Erín Moure
Galician poet Chus Pato and Canadian poet and translator Erín Moure discuss collaboration, Francoism, language rights and iconoclasm. PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write…
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With Care
Indonesian writer and artist Khairani Barokka writes on ableism in literature and translation.
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Out of the Ashes
The last in our series with Granta magazine on writers and their translators, Geovani Martins writes new short fiction, and Julia Sanches writes on translating it.
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Connecting Worlds, Inventing Worlds
The second in our series with Granta on writers and their translators, José Eduardo Agualusa and Daniel Hahn share an embrace.
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Editorial: PEN Transmissions x Granta
Our editorial on the PEN Transmissions x Granta Magazine series.
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A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
The first in our series with Granta on writers and their translators, Peter Stamm pens new short fiction and Michael Hofmann writes on translating Stamm.
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What We Have to Build Next
Tanaka Mhishi discusses appearing on a BBC documentary as a male survivor of rape, and what writers can do to tackle sexual harm.
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All These Write, Not I Alone: A Conversation with Vikram Kolmannskog
A year after the decriminalisation of gay sex in India, we speak to Norwegian-Indian writer Vikram Kolmannskog about writing self, place and queerness.
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Against the Current: An Interview with Gwen Davies
Welsh-English translator and editor of New Welsh Review, Gwen Davies, speaks to us about indigeneity, place, migration and translating contemporary Wales.
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Turkey’s Endless War on Books
Can Bahadır Yüce writes on self-censorship and the destruction on books in Turkey.
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Queer x Kenyan x Communities
Cherrie Kandie talks about the aftermath of being shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing for ‘Sew My Mouth’, a story about a lesbian couple in Kenya.
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Editorial: Transmitting the Future
Over its last twelve issues, PEN Transmissions has conveyed 35 essays and interviews to readers in over 120 countries. From this month, we will be publishing pieces every other week.
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When Utopia Becomes Tangible
No one on the receiving end of harassment or assault should have to feel that they are the ones who have to leave an event, or any event where a harasser is present, or that they are being made to leave literary circles all together and for good.
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Editorial: past futures
The four contributions in this issue range from concrete steps to achieve a utopia without sexual harassment and assault, to dystopian visions that are anchored in the more nightmarish aspects of our present, to reflections on how past ideologies have an impact on our present.
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Moth Eyes
My grandmother does not remember how she got here. She thinks she might have fallen from a violently rocking house. The house flew past rubber plantations, raging fires, massacres; horrifying scenes like that.
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Faces Afraid of the Mirror
Like every other country, this one is known for its beautiful sights. With its bombed buildings, destroyed museums, imprisoned artists, mass graves and nonstop shelling, it looks particularly heavenly.
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Living History: a Conversation with Kapka Kassabova
‘Often, we the natives of the Balkans or the Middle East, with our extraordinarily polyphonic histories and hurts, are narrated by others – usually others from the dominant colonising cultures.’
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