Ottawa, June 29, 2005 - The Canada Council for the Arts has embarked on a unique partnership with PEN Canada to fund a residency at a Canadian university for a writer in exile who now calls Canada his home.
The Canada Council will contribute $25,000 to PEN Canada to allow Genc Tirana, originally from Albania, to spend a year at King's College in Halifax (affiliated with Dalhousie University.) The Council is also considering the possibility of supporting a residency for a second writer in exile at another post-secondary institution.
PEN Canada is the English-language Canadian branch of International PEN, an international writers' organization which promotes the importance of literature and defends freedom of expression around the world (There is also a French-language PEN Centre based in Montreal). For the last three years, Canada has chaired International PEN's Writers in Exile Network and in 2004, PEN Canada created its own Writers in Exile Network, which seeks to establish partnerships with post-secondary educational institutions, libraries and municipalities to assist exiled writers so they can resume their writing and research activities in Canada. By contributing to this residency, the Canada Council's partnership helps broaden the Writers in Exile Network.
"We are fortunate to live in a country that values openness and freedom of expression, which is one of the reasons so many writers from other countries are attracted to Canada," said John Hobday, Director of the Canada Council. "Our literature is what it is today at least partly because of the contribution of writers who have chosen Canada as their home. By helping PEN initiate residencies for exiled writers, we are recognizing the contribution these writers are making to Canada's literary community."
PEN Canada President Haroon Siddiqui described the Canada Council's involvement in the Network as "of extraordinary significance".
"Canada is the only nation in the western world which helps integrate refugee and exiled writers into the mainstream literary community in this way," he said. "We are very pleased that an organization with the Canada Council's prestige and longtime support for literature is working with us on this important project."
While at King's College, Genc Tirana will make presentations in classes and other campus events, and work with students in the college's journalism program. As a journalist in Albania, Mr. Tirana wrote and edited books as well as social, economic and political articles for daily and weekly publications and worked as a journalism professor at the University of Tirana. He arrived in Canada in 2000 and is now a landed immigrant.
For more information about PEN Canada and the Writers in Exile Network, visit their web site at http://www.pencanada.ca/.
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