The Amnesty Imprisoned Writers Series

In 1995 Ken Saro Wiwa was sentenced to death by hanging after unwarranted charges and bribed witnesses, causing an international outcry and the expulsion of Nigeria from the Commonwealth. This August, acclaimed author Linda Strachan will read the dreamlike ghost story On the Death of Ken Saro Wiwa written by Wiwa himself a short time before this premonition became reality. It's all part of Amnesty International's Imprisoned Writers series, now a Book Festival tradition, bringing literature bourne out of persecution to life with the help of other writers from around the world.

"Wiwa said that a writer is not just a storyteller, but a voice able to shape the present and the future," says Strachan, a writer of children's fiction and a strong believer in Wiwa's ethos. "Young fiction is often dismissed as childish, but I'm aware what I say has a vast impact shaping young minds. It's a delight to be reading Wiwa's work."

Penny Simpson, meanwhile, the author of The Deer Wedding, will be reading work by Irina Ratushinskaya, a Ukrainian born poet who wrote while in a Soviet labour camp. "Irina famously wrote some of her poems on bars of soap," says Simpson, "What a defiantly creative gesture to have made in such appalling circumstances." 

Compiling the series is a hefty job, explains Amnesty's John Watson, who receives more requests for involvement than he can handle: "It becomes a case of checking which writers are already at the Festival, and seeing if there are any connections between them and the authors they read." All feel a particular connection with the author's work – whether it's the admiration of an ethos, like Strachan, or of their triumph over adversity, like Simpson. "The series offers an opportunity to celebrate writers who sacrificed so much and yet came out winning simply because they persisted in doing what they most valued," she says.

"That very act of survival is impressive, as is the realisation that it echoes further than a country’s borders through the medium of the written word.”

This being its twelfth run, the range from previous years has been vast – from poet Iyad Hayateleh, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp and, after years in exile, was recently granted leave to remain in the UK, to the Malawian Jack Mapanje, put behind bars for his politically subversive verse. For nearly two years he was refused all contact with the outside world and, after Amnesty campaigned for his unconditional release, was eventually freed and able to return to his career as an academic and poet.

Such success stories mix with the tragic, as authors come together to express solidarity with those who were not so lucky, fatally punished for the act of putting pen to paper. "It's a wonderful, powerful thing to be involved in," says Watson, "to hear modern writers so passionately bringing to life the voices of the persecuted is a beautiful, heartbreaking thing."