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Margaret Atwood and Khaled Hosseini are among 100 writers to urge the Iranian government to immediately release poet Ali Asadollahi from the notorious Evin prison.
In a public letter signed by authors, poets, journalists and scholars, the letter demands the release of Mr Asadollahi alongside all other writers who are detained in Iran.
The writers state that Mr Asadollahi, who was arrested last month, is being routinely interrogated, abused, pressured to make a forced confession, and denied access to a lawyer while in detention.
The letter accuses Iran of being the second-worst jailer of writers in the world.
“We join together to strongly condemn Ali Asadollahi’s arrest and stand in solidarity with him and with other writers, alongside all of the courageous Iranians who have been arrested or killed for expressing dissent,” wrote the letter, signed by Ms Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, and Mr Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner.
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Karin Deutsch Karlekar, PEN America’s director of writers at risk, added: “The brutal arrest and subsequent treatment of Ali has become the rule, not the exception, when it comes to how Iran treats its writers in its escalating crackdown on free expression and dissent.
“As Ali Asadollahi marks one month behind bars, his detention is an urgent issue that must not be forgotten among all the other shocking news coming out of Iran.”
Mr Asadollahi was arrested in the middle of the night on 24 January by agents for Tehran’s Ministry of Intelligence, weeks after mass protests against the Iranian regime ended with a brutal and deadly crackdown by security forces.
The writer, who was previously arrested in November 2022 during the Mahsa Amini uprising, was swept up in a wave of arrests during and after the protests, which were triggered by economic hardship but spiralled into protests demanding wholesale political change.
A member of the Iranian Writers’ Association, Mr Asadollahi has published six poetry collections, and was recently awarded the Gabo Prize for literary translation. In the letter, he is described by his fellow writers as a “leading writer of his generation”.
Arrests such as Mr Asadollahi’s have been happening for weeks following the government crackdown.
Reports of raids on homes and workplaces have come from major cities and rural towns, with university students, doctors, lawyers, teachers, actors, business owners, athletes and filmmakers all being swept up, as well as reformist figures close to President Masoud Pezeshkian.
The letter notes that several other writers have also been detained in Iran in recent weeks. IWA board member Yousef Ansari and another person were arrested after reading poetry at a memorial for Baktash Abtin, a poet and filmmaker who died in custody four years ago after delays in receiving medical treatment in prison.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency has put the number of arrests at more than 50,000.
