This week, our team members report on writers resisting governmental oppression, newly collected poems, one of the largest multilingual literary festivals in North America, and more!
Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines
Writer, translator, and Amihan National Federation of Peasant Women organiser Amanda Socorro Lacaba Echanis, whose imprisonment PEN International has denounced as ‘a stark reminder of how governments silence female voices to suppress dissent’, has rolled out an unprecedented bid for the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman student council while incarcerated under questionable charges.
The 36-year-old Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Malikhaing Pagsulat (Creative Writing in Filipino) student was arrested in 2020 for alleged illegal possession of firearms—an allegation she and several civil liberties organisations say is made-up. Amanda continues to write and translate behind bars, publishing her collection of poems, prose, and plays, Binhi ng Paglaya (Seeds of Liberation, Gantala Press) in 2023, and receiving fellowships from writing workshops like the Palihang Rogelio Sicat (which she attended virtually) in 2024.
‘Life doesn’t end in prison,’ Amanda vowed in her April 28 campaign speech, delivered remotely from Cagayan Provincial Jail in Tuguegarao City, where she is raising her four-year-old son. Her historic candidacy situates her detention as part of a global crackdown of dissent. ‘Bloom where you are planted,’ she urged.
PEN International, in their official statement on International Women’s Day 2025, called for the ‘immediate end to the use of red-tagging and other attempts to threaten and silence writers, journalists and activists’ like Amanda. Burmese memoirist Ma Thida, chair of PEN International’s Writers in Prison committee who was also a political prisoner under a Myanmar military junta, wrote: ‘The ongoing detention . . . is a damning indictment of the Philippines’ justice system. We urge the Philippine authorities to immediately conduct an independent and transparent investigation into the circumstances of [Amanda’s] arrest, including allegations of evidence planting.’
PEN International’s statement has since been reposted by the websites of PEN centres in Belarus, Romania, Germany, Flanders, Québec (Canada), Poland, the Netherlands, Greece, and Melbourne and Sydney (Australia).
Amanda is grantee of the 2023 Southeast Asian Translation Mentorship for her renderings of the revolutionary Kerima Lorena Tariman and former director of the Urban Poor Resource Center of the Philippines, and she also authored Tatlong Paslit na Alaala (Triad of Lost Innocence, 2006), a collection of stage plays, and Nanay Mameng (2014), a play venerating the legacy of anti-poverty activist Carmen ‘Nanay Mameng’ Deunida (1928-2021). Her ongoing detention exemplifies what PEN International called the ‘deadly toll of red-tagging,’ pointing to the cold case murder of Amanda’s own father, the peace panel consultant Randall ‘Ka Randy’ Echanis (1949-2020).
Amanda’s platform of governance for the student council, centred on land rights and academic freedom, further harnesses her unparalleled circumstances. ‘They can imprison me physically, but not my fighting spirit,’ she declared.
As elections (both the national midterms and UP’s student government) are on the horizon, her candidacy is a litmus test to determine if carceral, punitive systems can neutralise the scribes of the revolution. ‘What is presence anyway?’ Amanda asked her allies. For her advocates, the answer lies in the words she continues to write—and the futures they birth into being.
José García Escobar, reporting on Guatemala and Central America
Recently, Guatemala’s Centro Cultural de España (CCE) hosted its annual “Feria del Libro” to commemorate the International Book Day. The event gathered famed local publishing houses such as Catafixia Editorial, Editorial Cholsamaj, Ediciones Del Pensativo, and F&G Editores, among others, as well as La Fiera Shop, an important local art shop responsible for promoting the works of illustrators, graphic designers, and visual artists such as Luis Pinto, Petunia, and Michi.
During the event, renowned Maya K’iche’-Kaqchikel poet and filmmaker Rosa Chavéz presented her latest book, Espíritu del camino/Rajawal rib’e (Catafixia Editorial), which collects all the poems from Rosa has published in other books since 2005. This comes only a few months after Rosa was awarded the prestigious Prince Claus Impact Award. The Impact Award honors individuals whose work engages with their communities in innovative and impactful ways while addressing urgent contemporary issues. You can read more about Rosa’s work and career in the profile we published of her in 2022.
Looking ahead, Guatemala and Central America are only days away from the latest edition of Centroamérica Cuenta, the most prestigious literary festival of the region. This year Centroamérica Cuenta will gather the likes of Alma Guillermo Prieto (Mexico), Arnoldo Gálvez Suárez (Guatemala), Carlos Wynter Melo (Panama), Francisco Goldman (United States), Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombia), Negma Coy (Guatemala), and Nona Fernández (Chile) to name a few.
Xiao Yue Shan, reporting from Canada
Few cities are better positioned for multilingual discourse and cross-cultural exchange than the electric, Francophonic Montréal, home to some of Canada’s most exciting writers and publishers, and the annual host of the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival. This year, the festival reached its twenty-seventh edition, and under the green theme of ‘Time, the Tree, the Page’, over one hundred and sixty authors, artists, translators, and journalists gathered in the city centre at the end of April, ready to talk writing, ecology, memorialisation, conservation, industry, and legacy. Participants and attendees were encouraged to think about time—the way it may be witnessed by not only human endeavours but nature’s other appearances: how trunks and leaves may carry their own ideas about patience, transformation, and growth.
As expected for a gathering that defines itself with both cosmopolitan and identity-forward themes, translation was a central element of the programme. The talk ‘Translation Bliss’ featured the lauded poet Anne Michaels and her translator, Dominique Fortier, as well as the Prix Médicis and Prix Décembre-winning novelist Kevin Lambert and his translator, Donald Winkler; speaking on the intimate relationship that occurs within the translation process, the four commented on the dialogic effects that pass over from linguistic interchange into original writing, as well as the particularities that arise when considering that it is not a series of words being brought from one language to another—but a voice.
The other event of translational focus was ‘Translation: Staying Close or Straying?’, featuring Éryck de Rubercy, Marie Frankland, and Elisabet Ràfols-Sagués. Highlighting the aesthetic-technical aspects of their craft, the three translators opined variously on the concept that a ‘good’ translation has traditionally been thought of something that reads as an original. The fact that fluidity is a quality desirable in any text is certain, but the problem of familiarising foreign styles, specificities, and ideas is something that each translator must resolve on their own. It seems to me that one of the most exciting things about reading and learning on a global scale is to see the ways by which languages grow and learn from one another—how translation becomes a matter of sculpture, a methodology by which linguistic rules and standards can be renegotiated or broken entirely, thereby making room for new ways of creating, of imagining.
One should mention Éryck de Rubercy’s arboreal work, as close it is to the heart of this year’s festival. The author’s recent publication, L’universe des arbres, is a fascinating and comprehensive look on trees and all that they provide the world: in symbols, in metaphors, in scientific knowledge, in cultural and narrative significance. . . Through his intimate fascination and expertise, the author spoke throughout the days with scientists, engineers, and fellow writers on the role of trees in the struggle against climate change, and how we continue to spin narratives from their enduring mystique and thrall.
Every year, awards are given out in various categories, with this year’s International Literary Grand Prix going to Salmon Rushdie, expectedly opinionated in his conversation with the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. The International Edition of the First People’s Prize (presented to a non-Canadian writer of indigenous descent) went to the US novelist Stephen Graham Jones; and The Violet Literary Prize (awarded to a Canadian writer that identifies as LGBTQ) went to France Daigle, whose formally experimental work plays with self-given demands (the 2011 novel, Pour sûr, is built around the number twelve, and consists of 1728 passages—twelve to the power of three). The Primio Metropolis Azul (given to a writer that explores the Hispanosphere) went to Christina Rivera Garza, who spoke with the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths in an event concerning poetry’s corporeal and carnal explorations. Peter Wohlleben, Simon Sebag Montefiore, and Stephie Mazunya were also honoured for their work.
It’s always struck me as a bit strange that Canada does not better position itself to be a leader in publishing, supporting, and sharing world literature, considering our own bilingualism and ideals of multiculturalism. Perhaps it has something to do with that unruly and ravenous neighbour to the south, who overwhelmingly dominates the North American publishing market, but it is my hope that with the continual dedication of Canadian literary workers and a growing international network, there will only be more attention given to the fact that our industry has the potential to be a leader and champion of translated writing. Recent updates from an ebullient US president has given the country a strange and somewhat uncharacteristic burst of patriotism—it’s my take that we should put that energy towards something that has always been a source of pride and power: our stories, our openness, our literatures.
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