Article: Artists on the most-wanted list

Though this reflection will surely offer the chilliest of cold comfort to Ken Saro-Wiwa, the playwright, poet and environmental activist now under sentence of death in Nigeria, his experience of political punishment puts him in some highly distinguished company. Like his most assiduous supporter, the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Saro-Wiwa has known exile as well as imprisonment; and exile has been such a common experience of writers and other artists, from Ovid to Solzhenitsyn, that it may now be regarded almost as a badge of honour, a token of moral seriousness.

Earlier this year, the BBC's John Simpson published The Oxford Book of Exile, an anthology of writings by and about those forced ...

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