PEN International launched its International Case List 2026 on 23 April 2026. Since 1960, case lists have been updated regularly. This year’s Case List is entitled Writers Under Siege: Defying Silence. The launch began with Head of Research, Policy and Advocacy Ross Holder’s sobering overview of a world where ‘space for expression, culture and dissent is shrinking as governments intensify efforts to silence critical expression and target writers for their work’. The session was chaired by Peter Greste, PEN Perth patron, in conversation with three writers who have been persecuted for their writing or their promotion of books.
On the spurious claim of ‘extremist formation’, PEN Belarus president Taciana Niadbaj went to exile in Poland, as many Belarusian writers did during Lukashenko’s increasingly authoritarian regime. A poet and a translator, Taciana was the recipient of the 2024 English PEN Writers residency. Writing in Belarus has been oppressed for 200 years, she told us; more than 300 books have been banned, some for simply presenting Belarus history as a separate history from Russian history.
Hany Babu, one of PEN Perth ‘adoptees’, has spent five years and five months in a Mumbai prison on terrorist charges for fighting against the caste system and advocating for marginalised voices. Released on bail since February 2026, he explained that the protracted process of defending yourself is itself a form of punishment.
Mahmoud Muna is known as ‘the bookseller of Jerusalem’. The police raided his famous educational bookstore ‘on suspicion of inciting terrorism against Israel’ and arrested him and his brother. They were released two days later for lack of evidence. The police confiscated about 200 books if their titles contained words like ‘Palestine’, ‘Palestinian’, or ‘Gaza’, using Google translation as they read neither English nor Arabic. His message is to read Palestinian stories as a way to support their cause. Persecution makes you understand how powerful writing is. ‘Writers’, he declared, ‘are part of a bigger circle of oppression.’
Peter Greste concluded the launch saying, ‘No part of the world is immune’. As the three speakers talked about their enduring hope in this climate of helplessness, Peter stressed that ‘hope is not a strategy’, ‘we fetishise hope quite a lot’ but each action, each letter, each protest works through layers of pressure without knowing when the level of pressure will get someone released.
At the end of the PEN International Case List 2026 launch, Peter Greste reiterated his somewhat counterintuitive yet powerful credo, which is the product of his own incarceration in Egypt and which I had read before in his eloquently expressed testimony, The Correspondent, ‘Set aside hope, and act instead’.
Hélène Jaccomard, PEN Perth Acting Chair
penperth.com 