Articles

"The writers featured in this collection belong to the same generation with remarkably diverse voices. When read together, they reveal a shared landscape: a region where identity is constantly negotiated, where memory resists erasure, where loss becomes language, and where literature remains one of the last spaces in which human experience can be examined without simplification."

"When Syrians found themselves with neither the financial means nor the space in their suitcases to carry their homes, their friends, or the countless memories they had left behind, they learned to distil their grief into spices and beloved dishes. Their tears became recipes, their longing became flavour."

"The authorities use their subservient press to act as intelligence agents, feeding private information about individuals in order to silence and exact revenge upon them. Not content with hurling the most vile insults at me, they have also branded me with medieval stigmas to discredit me in their war against a just cause, a cause whose horrors and whose pain I have carried on my own shoulders, without ever once stepping back."

"I survived; I know this to be a fact. Still, there are moments when survival feels too simple a word for the distance between the life I was certain would end and the one I suddenly found myself continuing. Sometimes I cannot tell whether I came close to death and lived, or whether some part of me crossed into it and was sent back."

"Born in Bashkortostan and raised between languages and identities, Gulnaz confronts what it means to be Russian in a country that has long demanded its minorities become something else: "There is no such thing as a pure identity, least of all in a country where it is rewritten several times a century. All of it has already soaked into me, and I'm not going to pick any of it out."

"Five years after the Taliban’s return to power, Roya reflects on breaking the silence imposed on her. Once an engineering student dreaming of designing Afghanistan’s first skyscraper, now confined to her home, literature becomes a place where imagination resists prohibition and women’s voices endure despite all attempts to silence them."

"I am standing here to share my story, but in truth, it is the story of a war-torn country. It is the story of young people who watched their dreams vanish into the rubble of destruction. But most importantly, it is the story of vulnerable, yet incredibly resilient communities."

"Time for Indigenous peoples is not linear. It is an overlapping spiral where the past, present and future are happening all at once. It is called the Everywhen. Indigenous writers can imagine the apocalypse because our Ancestors lived through it."

"It is impossible not to rebel against such an injustice being done to someone who loves life and living as much as you do dad. But I am no longer rebelling; I am being patient. Because in this struggle, I know that in the end, the good will prevail."

"When I became a mother, I did not imagine seeing my child's smile would open portal-like, into a nonstop reel of rushed obituaries to young children in Gaza, or horrifying clips of teenagers in their Levi’s being marched out of their high schools or homes, tackled to the ground in the streets of USA by masked agents."

"We do need one another - even when we disagree. We have to acknowledge our sameness... Because in just a few weeks' time, it's as if global tectonic plates shifted under our feet and we've gone past a point of no return."

"Palestinian-Ukrainian peace activist and author Zoya Miari shares her experience attending the Frankfurt Book Fair 2025 and how it reminded her of the impact we can have on the world around us."