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International group plans writers’ haven in Las VegasASSOCIATED PRESS
1/10/2004 01:30 pmThe International Network of Cities of Asylum plans to open a regional office here in the next few months to help dissident writers seeking safe haven from repressive governments.
The Paris-based organization has selected Las Vegas for its first North American office, which is scheduled to open by March 1 at a historic downtown school, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported Tuesday.
Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, past president of the international body, said the Las Vegas office would expand the organization’s network in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Central America so that refuge can quickly be provided to writers.
The international writers’ group, with regional offices in Italy and France, has been focusing its efforts in Western Europe. Las Vegas was named the first U.S. City of Asylum in 2000.
Soyinka said the network is trying to place about 20 writers seeking to escape persecution.
“The demand always exceeds our resources,” said Soyinka, who holds the Elias Ghanem Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “We have writers on our waiting list from North Africa, Central Africa, Chechnya, the former Soviet Union, Iran. There is one from Afghanistan.”
Soyinka, a playwright, poet and novelist, was a political prisoner from 1967 to 1969, during civil war in Nigeria.
Authors sheltered in the city include poet Syl Cheney-Coker, who fled Sierra Leone in 1997 after a military coup, and Er Tai Gao, a Chinese writer and painter who spent 20 years in labor camps for what authorities called seditious conduct. He fled China in 1992.
Cheney-Coker returned to his country in 2003. Er Tai Gao, 67, now lives in Las Vegas and is working on the third volume of his memoir “To Seek My Homeland.”
Money for the local asylum program comes from donations made through the Institute of Modern Letters at UNLV. The current president of the international group is American novelist Russell Banks, author of “The Sweet Hereafter” and “Affliction.”
Salman Rushdie, who lived under a death threat from Islamic extremists after publication of “The Satanic Verses,” was sheltered and later headed the group, formerly known as the International Parliament of Writers.
Candy Schneider, chairwoman of the Nevada Arts Council, said Las Vegas’s role as a hub city for an international fellowship of writers will open doors, not just for the dissident writers who come through Las Vegas, but for the people here who can interact with them.
“Something like this really helps people to understand that the whole world is not here in the U.S.,” Schneider said. “There are ways of life that we don’t know and haven’t experienced.”