WHEN, WHERE AND WHAT YOU CANNOT WRITE
SoA chief executive Nicola Solomons offers a sobering reminder that not all writers are at liberty to express themselves
Nicola Solomons
There’s a strange and often sobering relativity that runs through the writing world, designed to limit writers and writing. It depends on many things – who you are, where you are, where you’re from, what you write, how you write, and more. It’s evident to a small extent when you shift between writing genres, or from one publishing model to another, or from prose to poetry, or from literary to commercial. It’s about how one writer can get away with what another cannot. It’s about whether you can write what you want or need to write. It’s never more noticeable than when you cross national borders.
In June I spent a few days in Minsk, Belarus, with the European Writers’ Council (the EWC, a federation of 44 national writers’ organisations which defines Europe very widely and will still welcome the UK post-Brexit).