CATEGORY: Magazine

Trouble in paradise

Trouble in paradise

The summer 2018 Index on Censorship magazine takes you on holiday, just a different kind of holiday. Visit Malta with top Maltese editor Caroline Muscat. This favourite Mediterranean destination is where a leading journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was brutally murdered approximately 100 metres away from her home back in October. In Baja California Sur, tourists take snaps of themselves next to whales, their lenses rarely taking snaps of another reality – the huge drug war raging in the Mexican state that has made it an incredibly dangerous place to live, as Stephen Woodman explores. The Philippines definitely wins awards for its stunning beaches, just not for its press freedom. Maria Ressa, CEO of Rappler, and Miriam Grace A Go, the site’s news editor, explain the harassment they have faced and why they won’t be silenced. And bestselling authors Ian Rankin and Victoria Hislop show you uglier sides to the tourist hotspots that are the backdrops of their books.

read more
Podcast: Trouble in Paradise

Podcast: Trouble in Paradise

The summer 2018 issue of Index on Censorship magazine takes you on holiday, just a different kind of holiday. From Malta to the Maldives, we explore how freedom of expression is under attack in dream destinations around the world.

read more
Podcast: Hay author special

Podcast: Hay author special

We spoke to three leading authors – David Olusoga, Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Javier Cercas – about taboos in their own countries, the issues that people are not talking enough about and the stories that might be currently manipulated

read more

A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.

A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.

The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.

The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.