April 2001 - Nr. 4
Hannover Hosts Exiled Writer from Belarus
TWIG - The Belarusian poet Ales Rasanau will be living and working in Hannover this year as the first beneficiary of the city’s participation in international effort to aid writers in exile. Rasanau, whose family lives in Minsk, arrived in Hannover in January, where he says he hopes "to work freely and to realize what I couldn’t realize in Minsk."
Since September, Hannover has been a member of the international network of "Cities of Refuge" founded by the International Writer’s Parliament in 1993. The network offers lodging and stipends to writers who are unable to work in their own countries for political reasons. According to Oskar Ansull, a writer in Hannover who is active in the project, Rasanau became a target of suspicion during the Soviet era, when he faced both censorship and government reprimands. Rasanau told reporters in Hannover that the situation in Belarus remains difficult for writers. The state publishing houses are subject to censorship, he said, and writers who are considered a threat are kept under surveillance. "Every author who writes in the Belarusian language is writing for the opposition," Rasanau noted in summing up. ( Arts / Entertainment / Culture )
