QUILLBLOG

Turkey comes to Frankfurt

The Frankfurt Book Fair has kicked off, and as Alison Flood writes in The Guardian, this year’s guest of honour, Turkey, is bringing a lot of political baggage with it. Some Turkish authors have boycotted the fair to protest their government’s censorship-happy ways, writes Flood.

However, some 300 Turkish authors are on hand, including “some who have been prosecuted under 2005′s notorious Article 301 law which criminalised ‘insulting Turkishness’ – most prominently Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, fellow novelist Elif Shafak and poet and commentator Perihan Magden.” (Pamuk, in fact, denounced Turkish state oppression of writers in his opening address.)

Flood continues:

English PEN is hopeful that Turkey’s presence as guest of honour could prove a real turning point for freedom of expression in the country.

“At PEN we feel that if authors like Pamuk and Shafak and Magden, who’ve all been the victims of Turkey’s anti-free speech culture are prepared to be here, that suggests to us that perhaps this is a really important moment and a positive moment,” says director Jonathan Heawood, pointing to Pamuk’s willingness to appear next to Turkish president Abdullah Gul at Tuesday’s opening ceremony.

As for next year’s guest of honour, China, Haewood is less hopeful about effecting change, noting, “we all thought the Olympics would give the opportunity for the government to gracefully allow more freedom of speech, but the opposite happened.”

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