On this year’s Day of The Imprisoned Writer, award-winning cartoonist Cathy Wilcox will turn her attention to those less-common practitioners of freedom of expression: cartoonists.
She will discuss how they, too, suffer and are punished, imprisoned and even killed for speaking out and drawing truths that the powerful – or fanatical – find objectionable.
Since the famous Danish ‘Mohammed’ cartoons prompted a discussion of where and whether to set the limits of free speech, and the cold-blooded killing of several cartoonists and others at Charlie Hebdo made us all the more aware of the potent danger behind the funny drawings, we have seen increasing examples of how seriously some people take cartoons, and the lengths to which they’d go to silence their creators.
Cathy Wilcox will speak of specific examples of cartoonists and artists whose freedom is currently threatened, their value as an indicator for the health of democracy, and of the range of views on what they should be “allowed” to say in this special event by PEN Sydney, supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.