Free the Word Night - Oxfam Novib PEN Award

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The evening programme will be opened by poet Asha Karami. Her performance will be followed by the introduction of the Free the Word!-speech by PEN International Chair Jennifer Clement. The speech, with a focus on the freedom of expression, will be held by Syrian writer and journalist Samar Yazbek.

Yazbek, born in Jableh, Syria, is the recipient of the PEN Pinter award, the PEN Tucholsky award, and the PEN Oxfam Novib Award for her book A Woman in the Crossfire (2011). Her book The Crossing received the 2016 Best Foreign Book award in France. Her books have been translated into more than 15 languages, and in 2018 Yazbek was shortlisted for the Prix Femina for her novel, La marcheuse, that was recently published in Dutch translation as De blauwe pen by Orlando Uitgevers in collaboration with Oxfam Novib.


The prestigious Oxfam Novib PEN Award, given out by Oxfam Novib director Michiel Servaes, honours authors who currently risk their freedom and their lives to seek out and publish the truth.

After the ceremony, Palestinian poet Asmaa Azaizeh and Turkish writer and journalist Barbaros Altuğ will be interviewed, on behalf of PEN Netherlands, by Hassnae Bouazza and Liesbeth Staats. Azaizeh and Altuğ will also read from their works.

The evening will be enhanced with performances by classical accordeon player Oleg Lysenko and will be hosted by Hassnae Bouazza. The Free the Word - Oxfam Novib PEN Award Night is a collaboration between Oxfam Novib, PEN International, PEN Netherlands and Writers Unlimited.

Information

Date and time Thursday 16 January 2020 from 20:15 to 22:00 hrs
Location Theater aan het Spui - Zaal 1

Line-up

Liesbeth Staats

presents every Friday night Nooit meer slapen on Dutch national public radio broadcaster NPO Radio 1. In addition, she used to be one of the regular anchors of the national Dutch television news program Brandpunt+. She also made and presented the 4-part KRO-NCRV series De Baby-Industrie and the NTR program De Kennis van Nu. Before that she worked as a reporter and presenter at AVRO's television news magazine EenVandaag and for many years she was the anchor of the NOS Jeugdjournaal. Staats studied Dutch language and literature at the University of Amsterdam and literature at the Sorbonne in Paris.
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Michiel Servaes

has been general director of Oxfam Novib since 2018. In this position and as chairman of the board, he is wholly responsible for the organization's policies. The management team also includes the director of operations, Pauline Mulder, and Ton Meijers, who is responsible for programs and campaigns. Servaes earned a Master in political science and international relations at the University of Leiden. He has extensive diplomatic experience, represented the Labour Party in Parliament for almost five years, and has worked in various policy positions at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His most recent position was deputy director of the social development department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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Jennifer Clement

(USA, 1960) is President of PEN International. She has authored five novels, including Prayers for the Stolen. It was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and appeared internationally on many book-of-the-year lists. In 2018, Gun Love was published, a topical novel about homelessness, the America love for weapons and the despair of people living on the edge of society. She has published various volumes of poetry, including The Next Stranger. Clement also wrote cult classic Widow Basquiat about painter and street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and life in New York City in the early '80s. She is a member of the prestigious Mexican 'Sistema Nacional de Creadores' and received an NEA Fellowship, an award of the American National Endowment for the Arts.
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Hassnae Bouazza

(Morocco, 1973) is a journalist, columnist, translator, researcher and producer. She publishes in various media (including Dutch national daily newspaper NRC and women's magazine Linda); runs her own online magazine for culture lovers, Aicha Qandisha. She compiled a story collection about Arab women, Achter de sluier (Behind the Veil, 1999); 2013 saw the publication of her book Arabieren kijken (Looking at Arabs), about "ordinary" people in the Arab world. She made TV programs for various broadcasters, including the documentary series Seks en de Zonde (Sex and Sin). Together with Michelin-starred chef Soenil Bahadoer, she wrote the culinary books Spicy Chef (2020) and Streetfood (2022). She published two further books in 2022: Een koffer vol citroenen (A Suitcase Full of Lemons), a requiem for and portrait of her mother, and Arbeidsmigranten in Nederland (Migrant Labourers in the Netherlands).
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Asmaa Azaizeh

(1985) is a Palestinian poet and essayist who became the first Director of the Mahmoud Darwish Museum in Ramallah in 2012. She currently works as a cultural curator in Haifa. She was born in Lower Galilee, the region in the northern district of Israel and studied English literature and journalism at the University of Haifa. Her first poetry collection, Liwa, was published in Amman in 2011, after she had won the A.M. Qatan Foundation Award. Four years later the collection As The Woman From Lod Bore Me (2015) was published and in 2019 Do Not Believe Me Were I Talk to You About War. Her poetry has been translated into languages including English, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew and Persian.
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Samar Yazbek

(Syria, 1970), journalist and writer of novels, short stories, scripts and non-fiction, is a great champion of human and above all women's rights in Syria. Yazbek fled her country after openly resisting the regime and lives in exile in Paris. She has won many awards, including the Oxfam Novib PEN Award during 2013's Winternachten Festival. The Crossing (2015), about her secret return during the war in Syria, was awarded Best Foreign Book in France. Her personal stories uniquely illustrate the situation in that country. In 19 Women: Tales of resilience from Syria (2018), Yazbek focuses on the role of women during the revolution. Her upcoming De Blauwe Pen (The Blue Pen) is a lively, poetic novel about a Syrian girl who cannot stop running through the middle of the insanity of the war.
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Barbaros Altuğ

(Turkey, 1966) is a writer and journalist who has been published in various Turkish newspapers and magazines. A collection of his articles, Some Like It Black, was published in 2012. In his 2014 novella We’re Fine Here, three young Turkish men emigrate from their country after the Gezi protests. His novel Wounds in My Soul, about the Armenian Genocide, is slated to be published in 2020. He is working on a novel that portrays four generations of a Berlin family between the years of 1960 and 2010, as well as on a novella about the lives of intellectuals who fled Turkey after the attempted 2016 coup d'etat. Altuğ has been selected for a residency at Writers Unlimited, January 2020, as part of the exchange programme Be Mobile, Create Together.
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Oleg Lysenko

(Ukraine, 1974) studied at the music academies in Poltava, Kiew and Enschede. In 1999 he released his first CD, Awakening featuring works by a.o. Vivaldi, Bach, Pachelbel and Piazolla. He specialized in Argentine tango on bayan and bandoneon at Codarts Rotterdam. As a soloist, he won the 2005 National Accordion Competition in The Netherlands with his rendition of Victor Vlasov's "Five Views of the Land of the Gulag Archipelago", also the title piece of his 2012 CD Gulag. He prefers genre-transcending projects in which visual art, literature and music enhance and flow into one another. He developed such projects with writer and visual artist Armando, sculptor and illustrator Koenraad Tinel, and with writers, journalists and filmmakers, including Stefan Hertmans, Cherry Duyns and Peter d'Hamecourt, among others. For his double-CD De sneeuwstorm (The Snowstorm, 2022), Lysenko arranged and played on bayan Georgi Sviridov's music to Alexander Pushkin's story of the same name, recited by Martinus Nijhoff Prize-winning Pushkin translator Hans Boland. With fundraising events and benefit performances, Oleg raises money to pay for an ambulance for the Ukrainian region of Poltava, where his family comes from.
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Asha Karami

is a poet who published the collection Godface (2019), in which the world and identity are definitively unstable and various voices speak through one other: 'ik lig op de bank / terwijl ik mee moet doen met de revolutie’, and: ‘dit was de laatste keer dat ik op mijn werkmail inlogde / ik ben niet meer het monster dat ik was.’ ("I'm lying on the couch / while I have to join the revolution," and: "this was the last time I logged into my work email / I'm no longer the monster I was."). Her poems, essays and short stories have also appeared in such publications as nY, Het Liegend Konijn, Tirade, Poëziekrant, Terras, Revisor, De Groene, DW B, Cimedart, Extra Extra, De Gids and online at SampleKanon, MisterMotley, DIG, Minutes of the Invisible, Optimist, and Ooteotee. She makes poetry films with artist Johan van Dijke. Her writing residency at the Jan van Eyck Academy led to curating programmes for Perdu. Besides writing, she works as a pediatrician.
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