Jean Rafferty and Drew Campbell drove through from Glasgow last week on the International Day of the Imprisoned Writer. Their first stop was at the Festival Theatre – who had very kindly agreed to lend us  a large and heavy metal cage. This was loaded into the van, assisted by muscle power from other PEN […]

    Tuesday November 15th marks the International Day of the Imprisoned Writer. PEN international, the global movement of writers, will use this important day to highlight cases of writers who resist repression of the basic human right to freedom of expression, and stand up to attacks made against them and their communities. The international PEN […]

  I first met Ragip Zarakolu six years ago, in Istanbul. I was there as part of a team of international observers to watch his trial – for what? I can’t remember the specific charge now, but there are two things the Turkish authorities hate. One is the suggestion that the Kurdish people are an […]

  I was quite surprised to get the call – or rather the email – inviting me to act as guest editor of the forthcoming issue of Scottish PEN’s online magazine. After all, I’m by some distance the least well-known of the three poetry-writing Rob M(a)ckenzies on the Scottish scene. So it was with a […]

This news just came in from   Ragip Zarakolu   Maison du Peuple de Geneve/People’s House of Geneva Ragip Zarakolu is one of Scottish PEN’s adopted cases Publisher and Human Rights Defender Ragip Zarakolu ArrestedThe Turkish police detained Ragip Zarakolu, a well-known human rights activist and director of Belge Publishing House, in Turkey. Zarakolu is also […]

As part of a remarkable charitable project, Vik Bennett at Wild Women Press has organised a calendar to raise funds for research into type 1 diabetes – her little boy Django suffers from it. Vik and her partner Adam are currently preparing the launch, and a pre-publication offer is available. Female poets ranging from Wendy Cope and Penelope Shuttle to Monica […]

Last night, a digital artist, Matt Zanetti, sent me three draft covers for my next eBook: Bird of Passage. They weren’t quite what I’d expected, but I was enchanted by the images which seem to reflect the contents of the novel in a unique and – for me – very emotional way. I’m finding it […]

Language is the greatest cultural achievement of the human race. A language, any language, is a creation of immense sophistication which has taken millennia to evolve. Nothing else tells us so much about a culture as its language. There are about 6,500-7,000 distinct languages in the world today. By the end of this century up […]