On 15 November 2025, an exhibition dedicated to banned books in Belarus was presented in Gdańsk. The exhibition opened as part of the award ceremony for the winners of the Jerzy Giedroyc Prize, the largest Belarusian literary award.
So, what did visitors at the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk discover when confronted with a visual project devoted to literature banned by the Belarusian authorities? And how did they read the arresting posters, and the stark, uncompromising information assembled by the PEN Belarus team?
The exhibition had its first outing in early autumn in Kraków, at the 91st PEN International Congress, where it caused a real stir. And no wonder: censorship and the urge to control speech are, sadly, global habits.
Poet and head of PEN Belarus Tacciana Niadbaj captures the essence of the exhibition:
“The books gathered here differ enormously – by genre, theme, geography, and by the depth of human experience they contain. Yet they share one defining quality: a refusal to accept the worldview of a totalitarian state. They show other models of life, alternative versions of reality. Their authors place no limits on thought or emotion – and that is precisely what makes them dangerous.
Real literature does not obey power. It listens to life, catches its breath, and in doing so both reflects and shapes a new social order. It does not serve – and that, in the eyes of a dictatorship, is its unforgivable crime.”
In today’s hyper-vigilant bureaucratic optics, even our first printer, Skaryna, would be suspected of “dangerous” passages. And how many “delayed-action mines” do the ideologues detect in Kupała, Arsiennieva, Łastoŭski, Niaklajeŭ, Bacharevič, Sieviaryniec… in our classics, in living authors, in writers from abroad?
In a country where truth is treated as a threat and service to people is deemed suspicious, the words of free creators sound like defiance – grounds for prohibition. The real issue is not loyalty to the ruler, but responsibility to oneself and to Belarus.
History teaches us this: no censor has ever triumphed over the written word. A book can be burned, but its meaning cannot be destroyed. A thought can be imprisoned, but it cannot be made to disappear. This is why literature endures as the strongest form of freedom – stronger than any regime.”
Read the full report at the link.
Photo: PEN Belarus | Alaksandr Drahavoz.