Olive Senior - PEN International
Olive Senior - PEN International
Olive Senior - PEN International
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WORDS ... WRITERS IN PRISON COMMITTEE 50TH ANNIVERSARY<br />
WRITERS IN PRISON COMMITTEE 50 TH ANNIVERSARY<br />
Ed Sowerby<br />
1971: Nguyên Chí Thiên<br />
It took me eight minutes to learn fifty words by heart last night.<br />
You didn’t remember fifty, you remembered five hundred.<br />
And not words, whole poems. Paperless poems.<br />
Stories from the Steel Trap.<br />
Forty years later it’s others who memorise them.<br />
Shows it’s not the ink that makes a writer.<br />
Poet Nguyên Chí Thiên . was detained repeatedly by the Vietnamese<br />
authorities for his writings and for ‘spreading propaganda’.<br />
He spent a total of twenty-seven years in prison, and was released<br />
in 1991. He lives in the US. See: ‘Because Writers Speak Their Minds’,<br />
the fiftieth-anniversary campaign of <strong>International</strong> <strong>PEN</strong>’s Writers in<br />
Prison Committee; www.internationalpen.org.uk and http://26-<br />
50.tumblr.com.<br />
5<br />
WiPC<br />
50
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