Shahrazad - Stories for life

Tunisian journalist and writer prevented from working in her own country because of her involvement in human rights. She faced a long term persecution and reprisals against her and her family.

On the 23rd of March Catalan PEN officially presented Sihem Bensedrine, Tunisian writer, journalist and human rights activist, as the new Barcelona Guest Writer at a press conference. Members of the Government of Catalonia and of the Barcelona City Council joined Ms. Dolors Oller, Chair of Catalan PEN, and Ms. Raffaella Salierno, Director of the Refuge Writer Programme, to welcome the new guest writer.

We are happy to present an unexpected outcome of our creative writing workshops in Frankfurt: The participants of the Spanish groups decided to continue their teamwork and founded their own circle of writers: Dámaso y los demás.

Last week, former ICORN Guest Writer Easterine Kire Iralu and photographer Anita Ingebrigtsen visited Stavanger as part of The Shahrazad Neighbourhood Challenge project. For six days, they explored the city and its surroundings looking for people, places and situations to take pictures of and write poems about, with the intent of creating a photo-poem-book about the city.

With the arrival in Barcelona of the Tunisian writer and journalist Sihem Bensedrine, Catalan PEN has started a new cycle of its Program Refuge Writer.

World Poetry Day is coming up this Sunday, and is celebrated one day early in Uppsala, as ICORN Guest Writer Anisur Rahman (Bangladesh) and former Guest Writer Faraj Bayrakdar (Syria) take part in an event dedicated to words, and to encounters between poets and audiences of all ages and backgrounds. The following day, Rahman and ICORN Guest Writer Zurab Rtveliashvili (Georgia) join a large group of colleagues to celebrate poetry and the free word in Stockholm. This event is co-organised by Shahrazad - stories for life .

ICORN Guest Writers Anisur Rahman and Zurab Rtveliashvili, and many others, come together to celebrate poetry and the free word.

In February Writers Centre Norwich organised for over 200 students at schools across Norfolk to work with a professional writer and a refugee to compose a series of Letters to Europe. These missives from the young people of the UK to their counterparts in Europe form part of an international conversation about the future of Europe, and the hopes and dreams young people harbour for it.

Serbian Dejan Anastasijevic is the ICORN Guest Writer in Brussels. He is an investigative journalist and writer, and has freelanced for Time Magazine and The Guardian among others. Anastasijevic is the Featured Writer this spring, presented with an interview at icorn.org. At the same time Shahrazad - stories for life presents some of his writing.

**********

BRUSSELS FOR BEGINNERS

Who but Shrek, an ogre from the eponymous movie, would choose to live in Brussels, a city whose name, translated from Old Dutch, means „a home in the swamp"? Although half way between Amsterdam and Paris, Brussels lacks Parisian glitz or the Dutch tolerance towards commercial sex and substance abuse, it even lacks a river (they used to have one, but they buried it). It does, however, have an average of 200 rainy days each year, poor infrastructure, and one of the largest Islamic communities in Europe. It also has an army of Eurocrats, who might as well be Martians, spending their days in heavily guarded glass towers, and their nights in Irish pubs which the natives gracefully ignore.

Still this city has many hidden charms, easily overlooked by a casual visitor. Although many downtown old buildings were destroyed during the soulless modernization in the 60s - in architecture, this kind of vandalism is known as "brusselisation" - a short walk leads to intact art-noveau squares and green parks. Not to talk about the museums: there's something for everyone, from Flemish masters, through Magritte, to Tin Tin, and on top of that the Museum of Musical Instruments, of comics, and, naturally, the Museum of Beer, honoring the Belgian national beverage. 

Belgian beer is universally acclaimed thanks to the special kind of yeast, Brettanomyces bruxellensis, endemic to Brussels and it surroundings. An average café offers a choice of at least fifty brands, ranging from white beer (consumed with lemon) through Flemish Red, to powerful Trappist beers with the alcohol content of 8 percent or more. Maybe all this beer (an average Belgian consumes a few hundred liters each year), is linked to the fact that Brussels' most famous monument, Mannequin Pis, represents a boy who, according to the legend, extinguished the fire with his urine. During festivities, beer literally flows from the Mannequin's body, less often it's champagne or wine. 

Argentina is Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, and there are many events scheduled for this occasion. One of the first ones this year was the reading of the Argentinian author Pablo Ramos in the series Monday Monday in Frankfurt on the last Monday of February.

In 2009 deBuren and Passa Porta launched the first edition of The Balkans and Europe, a series of cultural debates hosted by the Serbian journalist Dejan Anastasijevic (Time). Together with writers from the former Yugoslavia, Anastasijevic looks into several aspects of the European and Balkan culture.