Vasyl Stus Freedom-to-Write Award presented to Kurdish writer (05/31/98)

Vasyl Stus Freedom-to-Write Award presented to Kurdish writer

NORTH CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - PEN New-England's Freedom-to-Write Committee presented its first annual Vasyl Stus Freedom-to-Write Award to Kurdish poet and publisher Recep Marasli on May 17 at Radcliffe College.

The award was presented by Iraqi writer, filmmaker and dissident Kanan Makiya, who also delivered an address on the occasion of the Freedom-to-Write Committee's spring event titled - "Disturbing History: Art Out of Atrocity," a panel discussion focusing on how experiences of war, extremity and oppression affect writers and artists.

Panelists included poet Peter Balakian, who spoke about the Armenian Genocide; novelist Marcie Hershman, who spoke about writing about the Holocaust; and novelist Askold Melnyczuk, who spoke about the Ukrainian Famine. The moderator was Suzanne Burns, chair of the Freedom-to-Write Committee.

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The Vasyl Stus Freedom-to-Write Award has been inaugurated to recognize an international writer who has been imprisoned for the peaceful expression of his or her views, and whose courage in the face of censorship and oppression has been exemplary. The award comes with a $500 honorarium and honorary membership in PEN New England.

The award is named in honor of Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus, who became a leading voice of his generation and was the last Ukrainian writer to die in the Soviet gulag. Between 1966 and 1972 Mr. Stus wrote numerous open letters on behalf of writers and intellectuals he believed had been unjustly imprisoned and persecuted. In 1972 he was charged with slandering the state. Mr. Stus spent most of his remaining years in Soviet labor camps and prisons, where he died working the nightshift in a forced labor detail. In 1985 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His "Selected Poems" was published by the Ukrainian Free University in 1987.

The first recipient of the Vasyl Stus Award, Mr. Marasli, has suffered a long history of persecution, censorship and imprisonment in Turkey. He has a long list of detentions, beginning in 1978 when he was a teenager writing for a school paper. Upon his release he began to work for a publishing house in Istanbul that publishes works mainly on Kurdish issues and the history of the situation of the Kurdish minority in Turkey. In 1976 he became director of this publishing company that was the frequent target of police raids. He was later sentenced for "disseminating separatist propaganda" after publishing "Political Defense," an account of one of his earlier trials.

Mr. Marasli has written extensively about Kurdish and Armenian issues. All of the books he has written have been banned in Turkey. His poetry, translated by writer and poet Richard McKane, has been published in the Index on Censorship.

Mr. Marasli has been recently released from prison - there is no information yet about the status of his release or the current charges against him.

Mr. Makiya is a writer born in Iraq who now lives in Massachusetts. His books include "The Monument: Art, Vulgarity and Responsibility in Iraq" (California, 1991) and "Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World" (1993). Mr. Makiya reported for the "Frontline" documentary "Saddam's Killing Fields," which received the Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Television Documentary on Foreign Affairs in 1992. He is also the founder of the Washington-based Iraq Foundation.

The panelists

Mr. Balakian is a professor of English at Colgate University. He is the author of four books of poems, most recently "Dyer's Thistle," as well as the celebrated "Sad Days of Light," and a translation of the Armenian poet Siamanto. His acclaimed memoir "Black Dog of Fate" has been awarded the 1998 PEN /Martha Albrand Prize for best memoir. "Black Dog of Fate" was a New York Times Notable Book of 1997 and a "Best Book of the Year" for the Los Angeles Times, Publisher's Weekly and Library Journal. Publisher's Weekly called "Black Dog of Fate" "a prose masterpiece by an acclaimed poet," and the Philadelphia Inquirer called it "a landmark chapter in the literature of witness."

Ms. Hershman is the author of two highly acclaimed novels, "Takes of the Master Race" (1991) and "Safe in America" (1995). Currently in its fifth printing, "Tales of the Master Race" "portrays with chilling insight the gradual moral corrosion of Germany's Aryan middle classes" (Washington Post). Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times found the book to be "a searing portrait of the consequences of moral laziness and self-absorption." In reviewing "Safe in America:" the Boston Globe noted that the book is "Extraordinary ... it informs us that neither destruction nor salvation is ever likely to be final." Ms. Hershman currently teaches at Tufts University and Warren Wilson College in Ashville, N.C.

Mr. Menyczuk's fiction, poetry, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in many national magazines including Poetry, Grand Street, The New York Times Book Review, Partisan Review, The American Poetry Review and The Village Voice. His work has been anthologized in "The McGraw Hill Book of Poetry" "Under Thirty-Five: The New Generation of American Poets" (Doubleday, 1989), and "The Four Way Reader." His first novel "What is Told," was published by Faber & Faber in 1994. It achieved immediate critical acclaim and was selected as one of The New York Times' Notable Books of 1994. Now at work on his second novel, Mr. Melnyczuk divides the rest of his time between his editorship of AGNI magazine, teaching, and his ongoing interest in translating and publishing the work of contemporary Eastern European writers. Mr. Melnyczuk was the winner of the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award for Fiction in 1997. He teaches at Boston University and with the Bennington College MFA program in creative writing.