Turkish playwright Meltem Arikan’s Mi Minör was blamed for the seminal Gezi Park protests that convulsed Istanbul
“I wrote a play then lost my home, my husband and my trust”
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CATEGORY: Magazine
Censorship is still in the script
In June 2015, a national newspaper in Britain started a campaign to have a play banned. This surprised me for two reasons. One: clearly no one had...
Testament to the power of theatre as rebellion
The Belarus Free Theatre, whose 16 members have now gone into exile to escape the Lukashenka regime, are preparing to perform at the Barbican in London in 2022
Women journalists caught in middle of Afghanistan’s nightmare
Many journalists – women in particular – have fled the Taliban or are in hiding from the brutal regime
Playing With Fire: How theatre is resisting the oppressor
Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021
Contents – Playing with fire: how theatre is resisting the oppressor
The Winter issue of Index magazine highlights the battles fought by theatre of resistance across the world and how they've been enduring different...
“Apple poisoned me: physically, mentally, spiritually”
Ashley Gjøvik, who was fired by the tech giant after blowing the whistle on toxic waste under her office, says her fight will go on
“We need more courageous writers in theatre,” says leading Turkish playwright
Two Turkish writers discuss Index on Censorship’s new magazine, which looks at how playwrights and directors are resisting oppression
Respect for tradition: Australia’s selective listening on environment issues
First Nations voices are often ignored. Now Yvonne Weldon is hoping to change that as she bids to become the first Aboriginal Lord Mayor of Sydney
It’s not easy being green
Environmental activism is alive and well in Turkey, despite the peddling of conspiracy theories and government efforts to discredit campaigners
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.