In this issue, Index on Censorship magazine invokes the silent world of widows, who are the unreckoned detritus of war from Bosnia to Afghanistan.
Widows: Life after death
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CATEGORY: Magazine
Hate speech
In this issue, Index on Censorship magazine confronts the question of hate speech and opens one of the most important debates of our time.
Partitions
In this issue, Index on Censorship magazine asks “why partition”? Is there no other solution to the sectarian violence that stalks the post-Cold Ware world?
Banned poetry
In this issue, Index on Censorship magazine explores banned poetry and the limits imposed on artistic expression around the world.
The high price of oil
There is a strange congruence, Index discovers in this issue, between the broken lives of men, women and children in the war-torn Caucasus, and the strategic machinations of the oil industry.
Index at 25
Some of the best writers of our time celebrate Index’s 25 years and grapple with new and disturbing questions confronting an uncertain world.
Looking at kids
In this issue, Index on Censorship magazine surveys the state of the world’s children and finds much to be concerned about.
Hong Kong goes back
In this issue, Index explores the implications of the return of Hong Kong, a British colonial anachronism, to the People’s Republic of China.
Lost words
In this issue, Index on Censorship magazine explores the long history of censorship as a parallel and equally powerful history of literature.
Wounded nations, broken lives
Index looks at how South Africa, former Yugoslavia, eastern Europe and Latin America are trying to come to terms with past horrors.
A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.
The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.
The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.