Shahrazad - Stories for life

In collaboration with Catalan PEN, Shahrazad has published a book containing three texts by Zimbabwean author Chenjerai Hove. The texts are available in Spanish, French, Catalan and English, and illustrate Hove’s insight, humour, love and nostalgia for his homeland.

Letter to my mother was read at the Gobal Forum on Freedom of Expression in Oslo in 2009, The power of writing is a speech given by Hove at the ICORN General Assembly in Barcelona in 2009, while Identity is a previously unpublished poem read at the opening of the ICORN founding meeting in Stavanger, 2006.

Hove’s severe criticism of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe forced him into exile in 2001. He has since been living in France, Norway and lastly the United States as part of the Miami City of Refuge programme run by Florida Center for the Literary Arts.

Hove writes in English and Bantu language Shona, used by the Shona people of Zimbabwe and southern Zambia. He achieved international recognition by winning the the prestigious Noma Award for Publishing in Africa in 1989 with his first novel in English, Bones.

All texts can be read in all four languages via the Catalan PEN website.

On Wednesday 29 October at 17:30, ICORN will be present at a meeting in Tokyo on how to prepare the foundation for cities of refuge for persecuted writers in Japan and Oceania.

ICORN guest writer Sihem Bensedrine, Barcelona city of refuge coordinator Raffaella Salierno and ICORN director Helge Lunde will be presenting the ICORN organisation and Japanese cities (among them Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and representatives from Australia and New Zealand are expected to attend. The meeting is organized by the Japan PEN club, and is included in the programme for the World Congress of International PEN, who is convening in Tokyo from 25-30 September 2010.  

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.

Mr. Salem Zenia's speech was especially emotional, as he symbolically passed on the relay as Guest Writer to Ms. Bensedrine. In his speech, Mr. Zenia stressed how being an ICORN Guest Writer has made a difference for him, even in his own country. Fifteen years after his first novel in Tamazight was published in France, the book has been reprinted and can circulate in his native Cabilia (Algeria). To Mr. Zenia, this fact is a clear indication of how international support can help persecuted writers break through censorship.

In her own speech, Sihem Bensedrine denounced the systematic censorship that the Tunisian government wields on all the independent media and the complicity of European countries towards the African non-democratic rulers, in the name of the struggle against terrorism. To Ms. Bensedrine "the obsession of European countries for security has become totally irrational. They do not realize that by putting down the voices that claim democracy, they are leaving the field free for the radicals". Sihem Bensedrine herself is experiencing the negative consequences of this alliance. On request of the Tunisian and Algerian authorities, France has shut the Radio Kalima channel that was broadcasting through the European Satellite.