Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 14 November
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Writers and journalists are often among the first citizens targeted and punished by autocratic leaders. With creeping authoritarianism and instability in many regions around the world, it's an increasingly dangerous time for writers of all kinds.
On the eve of PEN International's Day of the Imprisoned Writer, we'll hold a special panel event as part of our Writers in Exile series to discuss old and emerging threats to literary freedoms today.
Host Sami Shah will welcome back the three writers who have shared their personal stories of exile – journalist Roza Germian, playwright Samah Sabawi and playwright and poet Mammad Aidani – for the last conversation in the series. They'll discuss their own experiences and their knowledge of press and literary restriction in their respective home countries. They'll talk, too, about the role Australia can and should play on the international stage with regards to protecting and protesting the freedom of writers here and overseas.
Join us as we talk free minds, free words and free expression today.
Presented in partnership with PEN Melbourne.
This event will be Auslan interpreted.
Featuring
Sami Shah
Sami Shah is a multi-award winning comedian, writer, and journalist. Sami is a lecturer in journalism at the University of Melbourne's Centre for Advancing Journalism, and is the Ambassador-at-Large for PEN Melbourne.
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Roza Germian
Roza Germian was born in the second year of the eight year-long Iran-Iraq war, in the city of Kirkuk under the Baathist rule. The majority of Kirkuk’s population were of Kurdish background and regularly targeted by the Baathist regime. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, her family along with four million Kurdish people became refugees in Iran and Turkey. Roza’s family arrived in Australia in 1996, where she later studied journalism. Roza is now the Executive Producer for the SBS Radio Kurdish Program.
Samah Sabawi
Dr Samah Sabawi is an award-winning playwright. In 2020 she received a Green Room Award for best writing for her play THEM, also nominated for Best Independent Theatre Ensemble, Best Independent Production and ...
Mammad Aidani
Mammad Aidani is a human rights advocate, acclaimed poet, playwright, theatre director, and distinguished psychosocial researcher investigating the violence, torture and trauma experienced by Iranians and Middle Eastern immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers who have resettled in Australia and the West.
Mammad has been part of the international art project, Heartbreak, at this years’ Venice Biennale, and his play In The Mirror will be restaged at La Mama theatre in 2020. He is currently working on a theatre project with a group of Iranian asylum seekers and refugees called Forough and Us, in which they reflect on the fearless personality and the unique and challenging poetry of the most significant Iranian female poet Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967). He has not been able to return to Iran over the last 40 years. Mammad’s writings have been banned and are not published in Iran.
Mammad was part of the list of invitees to contribute at La Mama theatre’s 50th anniversary in 2016. As part of his contribution to this event, he directed vignettes from his new play In-Waiting, written in Persian, and the play An Idiot Amongst Us, which was first produced at La Mama in 1996.
Mammad has been living in exile from his native country, Iran, since 1979. He left Iran several months after the collapse of the Shah’s dictatorial regime. As a young activist against the Shah, dreaming of living in a new, free, open and democratic Iran, he quickly became deeply disheartened and disturbed by the rapid rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and the extremely violent and dangerous situation in which he found himself. Becoming the subject of harassment and threats because of his strong views and criticism of the new regime, and fearing for his life, Mammad decided to leave Iran.