On The Record
Modern women's voices
Inspired by the legacy of journalist and writer Dorothy Thompson, On the Record is a global campaign amplifying the voices of women writers across PEN Centers around the world. Through short video testimonies, women will share their words, experiences, perspectives, and truths in their own voices. The PIWWC will expand and enhance these contributions, creating a collective record that brings women’s stories into focus and ensures they are heard, remembered, and impossible to erase. Because when women speak, we must listen—and when their words are placed on the record, they become part of history.
ON THE RECORD WITH PEN SYRIA
Women journalists, poets, and writers from PEN Syria speak up about the censorship women face in Syria and the barriers that continue to silence their voices. Through their words and experiences, they affirm the fundamental right of every woman to speak, to write, to create, and to express herself freely. Their message is clear: No to fear. Yes to our right to speak.
PEN International’s Women Writers Committee presents, ON THE RECORD… a series of interviews with Women Writers around the world, sharing the news of Freedom of Expression in their country accompanied by a short poem, or piece of prose, of theirs.
Judyth Hill, chair of PIWWC, and Catherine Marenghi, PIWWC Poetry Co-Director, are your hosts.
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Here we present Shirin Razavian, a British-Iranian poet and artist whose work explores displacement, memory, and the sacred in the everyday. She works in corporate finance by day and turns to poetry and painting for expression and restoration. Her work has appeared in Poetry London, Index on Censorship, Exiled Writers Magazine, The London Magazine, Agenda and Persian Book Review among others. She has published six Farsi and English poetry collections in the UK, the latest of which is Bird of Darkness, a selection of contemporary poems in Farsi. She is also the co-editor of Songs of Freedom, an anthology of Afghan and Iranian women poets published in 2024.