Fifteen winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature have signed a letter in support of Alaa Abd el-Fattah, the Egyptian British writer and activist being held as a political prisoner in Egypt.
Abd el-Fattah, whose writings were collected in the book You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, has spent nine years in Egyptian prisons at various times, serving time for his pro-democracy writings and opposition to the government. His current stint in prison is the result of a conviction of “spreading false news”; last December, he was sentenced to a five-year prison sentence on the charge.
In May, he went on a hunger strike in which he would only eat 100 calories a day. On Tuesday, he stopped eating at all, and said that he would stop drinking water on Nov. 6, the first day of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which is taking place in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.
The letter, signed by Nobel laureates including J.M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Louise Glück, and Olga Tokarczuk, is addressed to world leaders, and asks them to “use your plenary address to speak the names of the imprisoned, to call for their freedom, and to invite Egypt to turn a page and become a true partner in a different future: a future that respects human life and dignity.”
“We cannot yield the possibility of a different future to an amoral managerialism of crisis,” the letter concludes. “We must ensure that our words are spoken in defense of the most vulnerable—because we know that our silence puts them at greater risk.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
