Dear Prime Minister Starmer,
We write to you as long concerned supporters of the imprisoned writer, Alaa Abd el-Fattah. We write to you as laureates of the Nobel Prize for Literature. We write to you because time is running out.
For over ten years now Alaa has been punished by the Egyptian military regime for his writings, for his exposure of military killing of civilians, for his theoretical work on constitutions and the law, for his acerbic wit on social media.
On 29 September, he completed his latest five-year sentence but remains in prison. In a final bid to secure her son’s freedom his mother, the mathematics professor Laila Soueif, began a hunger strike. She has sworn publicly she will not break it until her son is free.
We urge you, Prime Minister, to intervene before it is too late. Not only because Alaa is a British citizen, but to re-animate the commitment to intellectual sanctuary that made Britain a home for bold thinkers and visionaries for centuries.
Sincerely,
Svetlana Alexievich
JM Coetzee
Mohammed El-Baradei
Annie Ernaux
Jon Fosse
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Peter Handke
Kazuo Ishiguro
Elfriede Jelinek
Herta Müller
Orhan Pamuk
Olga Tokarczuk
For more information on the campaign, please visit: https://freealaa.net/
