You’re going to spend some time today with someone special in your life perhaps, or you are taking your children on a hike in the country, or your grandchildren to the cinema, or you plan to cook a delicious meal to celebrate a relative’s birthday?

Your weekend is going to be much more active than that?

Photo cover Google.Are you geared up for a weekend of rest and relaxation with nothing more serious in mind than choosing which wonderful volume you're going to release from your pile of books, perhaps that favourite writer you feel is certain to help you while away your free time blissfully? The power of dictators to silence and imprison writers continues to ‘put all heaven in a rage’”. Her incarceration by the Iranian authorities was a sin against the light. I rejoice that she has been released from prison. Mahvash is at heart a lyrical poet who sings the beauty of the world. Michael Longley declared, “I am humbled to share the PEN Pinter Prize with Mahvash Sabet… a songbird trapped in a cage. It tells of the intense inner experience of a woman deprived of her freedom. In 2013, her first collection, Prison Poem, was translated and published in Britain. Thanks to some intermediaries, she managed to get her writings out of cell no. Sabet started to write in jail, where she lived in terrible conditions, subjected to violence and torture. Mahvash Sabet was released last month after spending nearly a decade in Evin maximum security prison, northwest of Tehran, after being sentenced to twenty years for belonging to the Baha’i religion, as always considered by the Iranian regime an “enemy of Islam”. In keeping with tradition, the winner of the Pinter Prize 2017, the Irish poet and academic Michael Longley, chose the recipient of the prestigious accolade.

Which is presented “to an international writer who defends freedom of expression, often risking their own safety.” The prize-giving ceremony of the PEN Pinter Prize, established in 2009 in memory of Harold Pinter, was held at the British Library in London. On 10 th October the Iranian teacher and poet received the International Writer of Courage Award 2017

Mahvash sabet poems