Date 15 Nov, 2022
Time 6:00pm-7:00pm AEST
Venue State Library of New South Wales, Shakespeare Place, Sydney NSW, Australia

PEN Sydney is hosting a special event to mark the International PEN Day of the Imprisoned Writer.

Guest Speaker Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert will be speaking about her experiences of being an innocent inmate in an Iranian jail for two years. Kylie recently released her memoir based on her experiences.

Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert discusses her memoir The Uncaged Sky: My 804 Days in an Iranian Prison which details her experiences detained in Iran as a political prisoner. Dr Moore-Gilbert will draw on her own story to highlight the impact of public advocacy and campaigning on securing a prisoner better prison conditions and access to justice, or in the best-case scenario, freedom. Dr Moore-Gilbert will reflect on the challenges faced by academics, writers and journalists in countries that lack strong protections for freedom of speech and expression.

This event is presented with Sydney PEN.

Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert is a British-Australian scholar of Islam and the Middle East. Kylie speaks several Middle Eastern languages and has spent significant periods travelling and conducting academic research in the region. In 2018 she was detained during a trip to Iran, and served more than two years of a 10 year sentence before being freed in November 2020 in a prisoner exchange deal negotiated by the Australian government. Her memoir The Uncaged Sky was published in 2022.

For further information visit the State Library of NSW event page and PEN Sydney.