Now it’s started. The most remarkable writing project I’ve ever been involved in – 26:50 http://26-50.tumblr.com/ . To mark the fiftieth year of PEN’s Writers in Prison committee, fifty writers from 26 have been paired with a year and a writer PEN campaigned for during that year.
The freedom to write what we want, or to read what we want, is a right we often take for granted. Yet PEN’s work has been needed because different regimes around the world know that writers are dangerous. They use words, they use them well, and those words can bring down the constructions of dictatorship and oppression.
This 26fruits website and blog are dedicated to the idea that constraints can be liberating. When I first wrote that I didn’t have in mind any thought that prison might lead to a release of individual creativity. I certainly don’t advocate that kind of constraint yet amazing stories emerge from the 26:50 project. For example….Denied pen and paper, imprisoned in 1971, the Vietnamese writer Nguyen Chi Thien carried on composing poetry in prison. He memorised the poems he wrote while locked up then let them loose into the world after his release.
Ed Sowerby’s fifty words about Nguyen Chi Thien will appear soon on http://26-50.tumblr.com/. So will fifty other responses to different writers who have been imprisoned, repressed and sometimes murdered for their writing. The responses are being posted daily between the end of February and 18th April when International PEN’s third “Free the Word” festival closes on London’s South Bank with an event featuring Derek Walcott and Chinua Achebe.
Fifty days in the lead-up to that. Fifty writers each with fifty words. This is a constraint that really works creatively – it forces you as a writer to weigh the value of each word you use. It drives you towards the discipline of poetry, aiming to give as much emotional power as possible in just a few words. That’s a discipline that every writer for business needs to practise and embrace.
Follow 26:50 to see how different writers have approached the task. Check in daily. My fifty words on the Indonesian writer Mochtar Lubis, imprisoned in 1962 will appear one day this week.
