'The 2017 PEN International Congress in Lviv opened soberly with the honouring of long-time PEN case list member Liu Xiaobo. Afterwards came acknowledgement of PEN campaigners from across the world who had died in the previous year – Rosie Scott was, of course, among the writers honoured and remembered. Twenty months after the horrific murder of 12 staff members at the offices of satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo, the Congress grappled with the tension contained in PEN’s charter between our core commitment to freedom of expression and our commitment as PEN members to dispel hatred. A legalistic paper generated out of the PEN International Peace Committee failed to secure immediate support, and a consultative group from across PEN’s membership has been formed to draft a paper for consideration at the 2018 Congress.' (President's Report introduction)
Contents indexed selectively.
'The Empathy Poems project is designed to raise awareness about the plight of asylum seekers and refugees. It is a response in particular to the situation in Australia, where asylum seekers have been banished offshore and treated in the most inhumane manner, leading to despair, suffering and deprivation. Their treatment is almost unimaginable, coming as it does from a civilised nation.' (Introduction)
'Australia is preoccupied with refugees and asylum seekers who come by boat and who have been continuously dehumanised and demonised. The refugees are damaged figures. They are marooned on islands in out-of-sight and out of mind locations. Many more are suffering in plain sight in the community with increasing mental health problems. In The Invisible, five artists come together to transform their refugee experiences through art. In this state of transformation, refugees are given voice and are able to heal the wound in the narrative gap that silences them.'
'A love of biography is driven by the universal hunger to better understand other human lives, according to Dr Peter Cochrane. “It provides us with that sense of how things are for each of us, or indeed for the lives of people we could not begin to imagine but for the biographer’s capacity to recreate the otherness of such people and their social world.”' (Introduction)
'In 2004, Australian award-winning novelist Tom Keneally and writer and academic Dr Rosie Scott (who died in May and was featured on the cover of the Sydney PEN magazine published during the 2017 Sydney Writers’ Festival) published A Country Too Far, a collection of fiction, poetry, memoir and essays by some of Australia’s acclaimed writers exploring the treatment of those seeking asylum in Australia. A Country Too Far won the 2004 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Community Award. Ten years later they produced Another Country, a Sydney PEN anthology that includes writings by refugees and former asylum seekers.' (Introduction)
'As Australia’s offshore detention centre on Manus nears closure, 22-year-old Imran Mohammad describes his four years there, where he learned English and fell in love with writing, while confronting a future without his first love – his childhood sweetheart in Myanmar.' (Introduction)
