'Free Speech in a Crowded World'

This year’s joint biannual PEN WiPC conference and ICORN Network Meeting is hosted by the City of Krakow in connection with the Milosz Festival. At the opening at the Jagellonian University on Tuesday 14 May, Timothy Garton Ash will give the opening speech, Free Speech in a Crowded World.

The author of nine books of political writing or history of the present, which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last thirty years, much of his work has been concerned with the late modern and contemporary history of Central and Eastern Europe. He has written about the Communist dictatorships of that region, their experience with the secret police, the Revolutions of 1989 and the transformation of the former Eastern Bloc states into member states of the European Union. He has examined the role of Europe and the challenge of combining freedom and diversity—especially in relation to free speech.

Timothy Garton Ash
Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and he writes a weekly column in the Guardian which is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas. 

His books include The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (1989), for which he was awarded the Prix Européen de l’Essai, History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the 1990s (2000); Free World (2004); and, most recently, Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name.

ICORN Network Meeting 
The ICORN Network Meeting is the main arena for strengthening ICORN and building our capacity to work for freedom of expression. It is a platform for the guest writers and city coordinators to meet, share experiences, and exchange and develop new ideas. In addition, we invite experts and representatives of literary and human rights organisations, and of relevant organisations like ECRE and OSCE. Spokespersons for partners, funders and for the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, will also be invted to make the 2013 ICORN Network Meeting a highly relevant event for all who are involved with the work of ICORN.