Writers in Exile: What Shuts Them Up?

This essay is the prelude to a new LRC series, “Exiled Voices: Dispatches from the Lives of Émigré Writers in Canada.” Each month we will feature a series of pieces by a different writer or journalist who, in recent years, arrived in this country as a refugee, fleeing a homeland where their lives were at risk.

I.

Fleeing into exile is a terrifying experience. Some of the accompanying events and circumstances are anticipated, as the new place, new language, new culture, even new weather systems, not surprisingly, make life challenging, at least for a few months. Others—the psychological and social traumas that can catch one completely off guard—may be unexpected. These challenges are particularly true for writers in exile, and as true (if not even more acutely so) today as it has been historically.

During the Cold War—that is, up until the fall of the Berlin Wall—many writers and intellectuals fled the Eastern bloc to the West, where they...