PEN members welcomed as Nobel Prize recipients

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Friday 16 April 2010

International PEN members welcomed as Nobel Prize recipients

The New Zealand PEN Centre is delighted to welcome the award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to Liu Xiaobo and that of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Maria Vargas Llosa. Both of these writers are prominent members of International PEN, which is represented in this country by the local centre.

Liu Xiaobo is a past president of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre and remains one of its members. PEN Centres throughout the world are now celebrating the award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to their colleague. At the same time they regret that he is unable to participate in the celebrations because he remains in prison in China without the chance to communicate with his friends and supporters.

Liu Xiaobo was arrested in December 2008 and was charged with “inciting subversion of state power”, for which he was later sentenced to eleven years in prison. The reason for this charge was that he had composed Charter 08, a completely new kind of document in the Chinese context calling for political freedom, greater human rights and an end to one-party rule. The document has been signed by more than 10,000 people in China. Six essays by his hand were also used in evidence.

Since his imprisonment at the end of last year, PEN centres have been conducting letter-writing campaigns, rallies, public readings and other actions in support of Liu Xiaobo, calling for his release as well as the release of at least 45 other writers held in Chinese prisons merely for expressing their ideas, beliefs and opinions. Even before the prize was awarded, the President of the American PEN Centre, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who joined Vaclav Havel in nominating Liu for the prize, said, “It is through the sacrifice of writers like Liu Xiaobo that freedom of expression gains ground. And it is through international solidarity, represented best by the Nobel Peace Prize, that those who make these crucial sacrifices are sustained and freed.”

The Peruvian writer Maria Vargas Llosa, a former president of International PEN, has also spoken out vigorously against all forms of dictatorship, especially in his native Latin America. He is the author of more than thirty remarkable novels, including one set in the Pacific: The Road to Paradise (2003). His best-known books include Conversation in the Cathedral and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. The New Zealand PEN Centre joins its fellows in other countries in congratulating Vargas Llosa on his award, which is richly deserved on the basis of a lifetime’s contribution to the literature of the world.

ENDS

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