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The PEN America Literary Awards Are Canceled. The Writers Know Why.
“I know that no amount of prestige or prize money is worth the lifelong shame of knowing you were on the wrong side of a genocide.”
“My hope is that we will see many forms of continual solidarity with Palestine, not all of which will be obvious or public, or by famous folks or writers, and that rather than produce shame or discouragement amongst those of us who cannot say anything or voice discontent in ways we accept as righteous, this will push those with much more power than any of us individually to start revising the collective choices that have led us to the atrocities of the present, exemplified by the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” he said in a statement. Immediately following Jarrar’s protest, more than 1,300 writers began signing an open letter demanding “PEN America release an official statement about the 225 poets, playwrights, journalists, scholars and novelists killed in Gaza and name their murderer: Israel, a Zionist colonial state funded by the U.S. government.” The next domino fell at an event on March 13, when star writers including Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, Hisham Matar, Isabella Hammad, Maaza Mengiste, Zaina Arafat, and Susan Muaddi Darraj withdrew from the World Voices Festival over the organization’s failure to join in calls for “an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.” (As of writing, that event is still scheduled to take place in New York and Los Angeles May 8–16.) But Finney Boylan’s response was remarkable for its tone-deafness — at a time when writers are voicing strong criticisms about the organization, she chose to open her own statement with a bizarre list of collective nouns for groups of animals to describe what she’s calling a “ schism of writers.” She argues that conversation, not “silencing,” is the only way forward.
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