The Residency Program of the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN)
The ICORN network was established in Norway in 2005. One of the network’s originators was Salman Rushdie, whose novel, The Satanic Verses, raised violent protests throughout the Islamic world. According to Rushdie’s idea, the aim of ICORN is to promote inalienable values of the freedom of speech and creation by building a network of international solidarity and co-operation. During 15 years of its activity, ICORN has found temporary places of refuge for several hundred writers, intellectuals, bloggers, and human rights activists.
You can apply for the programme via an application form available at ICORN official website.
The ICORN residents in the years 2011-2024 were:
Maria Amelie, real name: Madina Salamova – a young writer of Russian descent. She was born in Vladikaukaz in North Ossetia. For political reasons and in fear of being persecuted, Maria Amelie’s family moved illegally to Finland and then to Norway. During the following 8 years, Maria Amelie completed studies and worked in the cultural sector. In 2010, her debut book entitled Illegal Norwegian was published, causing a media storm and a nationwide debate on the perception of immigrants and refugees in Norway and in Scandinavian countries. The book became a bestseller and stirred public opinion, but it also became the reason why the writer was told to leave the country. This story divided Norwegian society into followers and opponents of the immigration policy. On the 12th of January 2011, during her speech in the Fridtjob Nansen School in Lillehammer, Amelie was arrested. She was kept in a prison for refugees for 7 days.In spite of huge support from the media, protests on the streets of Oslo and reactions of international institutions, she was deported to Moscow. Then she was granted cultural refuge at the Villa Decius Association in Krakow. In Krakow, she completed her second book about her experience following imprisonment: deportation and seeking of asylum. Having returned to Norway, she started work on a theatrical play based on her first book together with Nina Wester. The play was successfully staged in Opole in June 2011.
Kareem Amer, real name: Abdulkareem Nabil Soliman Abdulhameed Amer (born 1984) – a young Egyptian blogger, journalist and human rights defender. He was born to a pious Islamic family. In the years 2004-2006, he published a cycle of entries on his blog that criticised the Al Azhar University for the dissemination of extremist ideas and revealed information about the regime of President Mubarak. He was the first Arabian blogger who was sentenced to 4 years of imprisonment for ‘insulting Islam’ and ‘disseminating false information about President Mubarak.’ This sentence caused a series of protests worldwide, which were expressed, among others, via freekareem.org – a website created especially for this purpose. In spite of having been released from prison, he was persecuted, tracked and intimidated. He received death threats from Islamic extremists. Amer’s activities exposing mechanisms of action of fundamentalists coming to power, advocating the secularity of the state, the right to freedom of religion and conscience and the transformation of Egypt into a state of freedom and tolerance were highly esteemed by the international community of journalists, reporters and ICORN experts. PEN International and The Writers in Prison Committee PEN spoke in his defence. For his activity, Kareem Amer was granted the Reporters without Borders prize in 2007. Being widely available on the Internet, his texts were often quoted in comments of leading press agencies both as the uncompromising voice of the young generation of Egyptians that led to political and systemic transformations and as an important example of the use of electronic media and the Internet for demanding respect for human rights and the right to the freedom of religion, opinion and speech.
Mostafa Zamaninija (born 1957) – an Iranian writer, publisher, academic teacher and agent. He has published many books dealing with Iranian history and culture, as well as poetry, novels, screenplays and essays. His novels (for example, Kudām zamīn shādtar ast, Bigū bih Māh Biyāīd, or Rāh-i Darāz-i Istānbūl) were banned in Iran. His two-volume work Farahan, An Ancient Land became a point of reference for historians exploring the literature, history and culture of ancient Persia. From the 1980s, Zamaninija was a target of persecutions, arrests and censorship by Iranian authorities, which became particularly intense after the presidential election in 2009. During that period, he wrote an open letter to the government, in which he criticised censorship and the treatment of the Green Movement. Consequently, Zamaninija was arrested, his house was searched, and his computer, books and other publications were confiscated. He arrived in Krakow in 2013 to continue his research and write the third volume of Farahan.
Lawon Barszczeuski (born 1958 in Polotsk) – a Belarusian writer, philologist, translator, poet and politician.He studied philological sciences at the Institute of Teaching in Mińsk.From 1991, he was Vice-Director for Science and Methodology of the Belarusian Education & Cultural Centre of Human Sciences at the Ministry of Education of the National Belarusian Republic (since 2003, after its official dissolution by the Belarusian government, this institute has functioned illegally as the Belarusian Secondary School of Human Sciences). In 1991, after the declaration of Belarus’ independence, he began his political activity.In the years 1990-1995, he was a member of the 12th term of the Supreme Council of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic/Council of the National Belarusian Republic. He was the leader of many parliamentary working groups devoted to the educational system and national minority issues. In 1995, Barshcheusky took part in protests against laws of President Alexander Lukashenka. Because of this participation, he was excluded from the Parliament in the years 1996-99. In the years 2007-2009, he was again the chairman of the opposition party Belarusian People’s Front. In spite of political discrimination, he was still politically active and promoted the Belarusian issue abroad. Since 2012, he has been a columnist of Narodnaja Wola – the only oppositional daily newspaper in Belarus. He has translated works from Latin, ancient Greek, German, English, French, Polish (including works by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Berthold Brecht, Franz Kafka, Stanisław Wyspiański, Bruno Schulz, Czesław Miłosz, Sławomir Mrożek). In the years 2003-2005, he was the chairman of the Belarusian PEN Club. He is the author of four books and a co-author of fifteen works; he has written prefaces to several editions and has translated literary works and historical dissertations of over forty authors into Belarusian. He has been the editor of fifteen editions.In total, he signed a few hundred publications with his name. His scientific achievements include works on the methodology of language and literature, linguistics and literary studies.
Asli Erdogan (Istanbul) – Turkish writer and journalist. Since her novel The Sea Shell Man was published in 1994, she has written over a dozen books, including novels, short stories, collections of stories, poetic prose, as well as a selection of political essays. She has worked as a columnist and journalist – since 1998, mainly for the leftist newspaper “RADİKAL” and “Özgür Gündem”, a bilingual Kurdish newspaper she has regularly collaborated with until now.
In her books and articles, she takes on subjects such as state-sanctioned violence, discrimination and human rights violations. She has been a freedom activist since 1993, as a result of which she has been persecuted, fired multiple times and has spent over a dozen years in exile.
She studied computer engineering (received her bachelor degree in 1988) and physics (master’s degree in 1993); she wrote her master’s thesis about Higgs physics in Geneva, where she worked as a high energy researcher at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. Later, she moved to Rio de Janeiro, where she began writing her doctoral dissertation; however, she gave up on her academic career in 1995. After a two-year stay in South America, she returned to Istanbul and began her writing career.
Her literary work, largely ignored in her own country, has been the subject of over a hundred articles, essays and academic papers published in the leading newspapers and magazines throughout Europe, including “Lire”, “Le Monde”, “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, “Die Welt”, “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”, “Die Presse and Aftenposten”, as well as analyses by such writers as Orhan Pamuk, Ingo Arend, Ruth Klüger and Eugene Schoulgin. The magazine “Lire” placed her on the list of “50 writers of the future”, naming her work a modern classic. Erdogan’s work has been translated into many languages, including English, French, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Arab and Bosnian. Fragments of her prose have been staged in Milan and presented in the theatre. One of her short stories has been turned into a film in France. She has received Simone de Beauvoir Prize for the book The Stone Building and Other Places in 2018.
Felix Kaputu (born 1959 in Congo) – Congolese writer, academic, literary critic, social activist, and Fulbright scholar, Prof. Felix Kaputu. Felix Kaputu is a specialist in the field of African Studies, art and philosophy. In his academic work, he also studied issues of gender, African mythology and literature. He conducted research and taught in the US, Japan, Belgium. In 2003, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship as well as one at the University of California. He is the author of six books and nearly 60 publications concerning, among others topics, the difficult situation of women in Africa, HIV and AIDS. In May 2005, Kaputu was arrested without a warrant by the National Security Agency (ANR). He was accused of being responsible for the secession movement of 20 000 soldiers in the province of Katanga, smuggling weapons and inciting rebellion. According to official report he was to be sentenced to 30 years in prison or death. He was detained for 10 days and was in custody, where he was denied food and threatened with death. He witnessed the use of physical violence and mysterious disappearances of other detainees. Moved to the correctional facility of Makala in Kinasha, Kaputu was finally released thanks to the intervention of Amnesty International, pressure from the media and academia. After his release from prison he was under constant supervision, which made it impossible for him to return to the university. In 2006, he left the country on a Scholars at Risk scholarship.
Kholoud Charaf – a poet, an art critic and a social activist in search of better opportunities for women and children who survived the war. She was born in Al Mjemr in the south of Syria. In 2016 she published her first poem collection, The Remains of Butterfly The originality of literary images and metaphors and the author’s ability to transform the difficult events of war into beautiful, imaginary worlds generated from memories has been well received by critics. In 2019 she has received the Ibn Battuta Award in the field of reportage for her second published book, a poetic diary Return to the Mountains. A Journal in the Shadow of War. Her poems has been translated into English, French, Italian and Polish. The bilingual poem collection entitled Odwrócone niebo / Reversed Sky was published in Poland in 2019.
Aaiún Nin - a poet, mixed media artist and activist from Angola. In her work she addresses the issues of race and sex discrimination, as well as LGBT+ experience. In 2016 she moved do Denmark, where she has worked in collaboration with artists identifying with queer culture (an artistic and political movement oriented towards empowerment and emancipation of non-heteronormative poeple). She has performed her poetry during numerous events, e.g. during Oslo Internasjonale Poesifestival in 2020. Together with her wife she has also appeared in a documentary film ‘Women of Water’, directed by Patricia Bbaale Bandak in 2017.
Her poetry draws upon the experience of childhood and youth spent in a traditional, patriarchal community and is strongly rooted in the context of postcolonial Africa. In her poems she often refers to the present situation in Angola, addressing problems of sexual violence inflicted on women, religious fundamentalism and the contradictions of Catholic doctrine, social inequalities and racism. Living in Copenhagen Aaiún Nin has also spoken of legal discrimination of immigrants and police violence in Scandinavian countries, and, sympathising with Black Lives Matter movement, she has stressed the need to rethink the hidden racial inequalities and defended the rights of black poeople. Her articles and poems have been published in ‘Friktion Magasin’, ‘Kritiker’ and ‘Klimaaksjonen’ (Norwiegian Writers’ Climate Campaign – NWCC).
Andrej Chadanowicz - Andrei Khadanovich – poet, translator of poetry, literary critic, essayist. Born 1973 in Minsk. In 1995, he graduated from the philological department of the Belarusian State University, where he would then give lectures on the history of French literature for a long time. He taught in the famous Belarusian High School in Minsk. He conducted translation workshops in the Belarusian College and in the Belarusian PEN Club. His poems have been translated into English, Czech, Spanish, Lithuanian, German, Slovak, Slovenian and Russian. He is a member of the Union of Belarusian Writers and the Belarusian PEN Club, and since 2021 also a member of the Polish PEN Club. He translated, sang and recorded the album “Mury” by Jacek Kaczmarski in Belarusian. His version of the title track has become an unofficial anthem of the Belarusian opposition. He translated poetry from English (Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, and others), Russian (Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Iosif Brodsky, Gennadiy Aygi), Ukrainian (Yurii Andrukhovych, Serhiy Zhadan, and others), French (Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, and others) and Polish (Mickiewicz, Norwid, Fredro, Gałczyński, Miłosz, Szymborska, Herbert, Twardowski, Krynicki, Lipska, Zadura, and others). For his translations of Polish literature, he received the Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture and the Polish PEN Club Award, and for his translations of Charles Baudelaire, he was honored with the Carlos Sherman Prize. He translated, sang and recorded the album “Mury” by Jacek Kaczmarski in Belarusian. His version of the title track has become an unofficial anthem of the Belarusian opposition.
Uładzimir Niaklajeu – born in 1946 in Smarhon, Grodno Region, a Belarusian poet, novelist and socio-political activist. Author of novels, historical dramas and several poetry volumes, the winner of the prestigious prize of Kurt-Tucholsky. His books have been translated into Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Swedish and Finnish. He worked as a telegraphist in Siberia and Far East, as well as in a television studio in Minsk as a radio technician. As a journalist, he worked with the newspaper “Znamia Junosti” and the bulletin “Theater Minsk”, and was editor of the literary and dramatic programs of Belarusian television. He was the editor-in-chief of the contemporary literature monthly “Krynica” (“Spring”; 1986-1997), editor-in-chief of the cultural weekly “Litaratura i Mastatstva” (“Literature and Art”; 1998), President of the Union of Belarusian Writers (1999-2001) and President of the Belarusian PEN-Club (2005-2009). In 2012, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize by the Belarusian PEN Center and the Belarusian Union of Writers. In 1999, he was forced to leave Belarus for political reasons. He lived and worked in Poland and Finland. He returned to Minsk in 2001. In 2010, he ran in presidential elections as an independent candidate. On the election day, he was severely beaten by a special police unit and subsequently kidnapped from the hospital and arrested. Amnesty International recognized Uladzimir Nyaklyayew as a prisoner of conscience. Uladzimir Nyaklyayew is the winner of almost all Belarusian literary prizes, including the Yanka Kupala State Prize, independent prizes, including the Jerzy Giedroyc Award and Natalia Arsenieva Award, as well as international awards: Kurt-Tucholsky-Preis, Bronisław Geremek Prize, Mihai Eminescu Award, and others.
Ersan Pekin is a Turkish writer and former journalist. He is the author of Kadınlar Yedi Bitirdi Beni (Consumed by Women), published in 2013, which tells the story of a man suffering from sex addiction. He self-published the Puzzle trilogy (2019-2021) as well as three novels in English: "Roots" (2021), "Pathetic and Synthetic Thoughts in a Jar" (2021) and "Earthscraper" (2021). His novels explore the dynamics of relationships between men and women, and blurred lines between reality and dreams. Several of his short stories have been published in Berfin Bahar and İnsancıl magazines.
A former journalist, Ersan Pekin previously worked as a reporter at the Ankara bureau of Ulusal Kanal, a private nationwide TV channel. He joined Ulus Gazetesi, a newspaper, in 2016 where he worked as editor-in-chief until he was dismissed from his role in 2019, reportedly for his ‘liberal and antimilitarist ideas and writings’.