Literature and Freedom of Expression: A Conversation with PEN International President Burhan Sönmez

PEN INTERNATIONAL, as the world’s largest writers’ organization, is established to promote literature and defend freedom of expression. After its foundation in London in 1921, while Europe was under the post-clouds of World War I, it quickly spread and now has centers in more than a hundred countries. PEN INTERNATIONAL, which has helped writers in countless cases for a century, is faced with new conflicts in every period. While dealing with different problems that arise in every region, from Eritrea to Myanmar, from Ukraine to the USA, it continues to make intense efforts today, as it did in the past, to defend literature and freedom of expression in the Middle East, too, from Turkey to Israel/Palestine. This struggle, led by writers such as Catherine Amy Dawson Scott, H.G. Wells, Arthur Miller and Heinrich Böll, continues to develop by renewing itself in every period and producing new responses to new problems.

Burhan Sönmez is the author of six novels. He is president of PEN International and a Senior Member of Hughes Hall College and Trinity College, University of Cambridge. His novels have been translated into forty-eight languages and received international prizes, including the EBRD Literature Prize and Vaclav Havel Library Award. He was born in Turkey and grew up speaking Turkish and Kurdish. He worked as a lawyer in Istanbul before going to Britain for political reasons and living there in exile for several years. He has been on the judging panel of several events, including Inge Feltrinelli Prize and Geneva International Film Festival and written for press such as La Repubblica, Der Spiegel and The Guardian. He has translated the poetry book of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake into Turkish. Having written five novels in Turkish, he began to write in his mother tongue, Kurdish, with his last novel Lovers of Franz K. He lives between Cambridge and Istanbul.

Sponsored by: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Department of Comparative Literature