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Friday, May 22
Global Free Speech

Andrei Aliaksandrau on trial in Belarus in June 2022. Photo: Belta.by It will be no revelation when I say Belarus prisons are bleak. The conditions are dirty, the routines mind-numbing and the guards brutal. But perhaps this detail will surprise you: in the middle of some prisons are books. Beautiful, transportive books. Even politically risqué books. “This atmosphere was complemented by an unexpectedly rich library, where prisoners could even find Orwell or Machiavelli,” one former detainee told the human rights organisation Viasna this week. “Books became a lifeline. From the prison library and bookshop, I managed to access literature that helped me endure,” said Larysa Shchyrakova in an article she wrote for us last month. For her, one book in particular, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which details the Viennese neurologist’s experience in a Nazi concentration camp, became essential reading. A library in jail cuts both ways though. In some penal colonies the way to punish political prisoners is not to allow them access, so they have to risk further punishment by borrowing books from fellow inmates. Today, 21 May, is the International Day of Solidarity with Political Prisoners in Belarus. We’re thinking of all the 1,000-plus prisoners wrongfully detained and we’re especially thinking of our colleague Andrei Aliaksandraŭ. We don’t know exactly what his daily life is like – we haven’t been able to directly contact him in years – but we do hope that erudite and curious Andrei will not be one of the unlucky ones forbidden the solace of reading. By January this year, Andrei had spent five of his birthdays in prison. A journalist by training, who once worked for Index in our London office and later became a regular contributor from Belarus, Andrei was sentenced to 14 years on a charge of high treason several years ago. To mark the grim anniversary and to keep his case in the spotlight, we wrote this about him. We feel we have failed Andrei. Others have been released ahead of their full sentence. Andrei has not. That’s not through lack of trying. While our dreams to have his name flash up in his favourite Liverpool FC stadium have yet to materialise, we’ve managed to get Margaret Atwood, Nadya from Pussy Riot, Index chair Sir Trevor Phillips and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore to read lines from a poem he wrote from prison. We’ve sent letters to him and to politicians. We’ve published a letter of his too, written on the day of his trial. If anything gives a sense of his character – kind, generous, optimistic – it is this. But still, he is in prison. For doing nothing. No, for doing something heroic – helping protesters following the fraudulent election back in 2020. That’s not to say what we’ve done has been in vain. For Andrei and his family, there has been comfort in knowing he has not been forgotten, and comfort in the knowledge that one day he will walk free. We hope that day comes soon. READ MORE

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Andrei Aliaksandrau on trial in Belarus in June 2022. Photo: Belta.by It will be no revelation when I say Belarus prisons are bleak. The conditions are dirty, the routines mind-numbing and the guards brutal. But perhaps this detail will surprise you: in the middle of some prisons are books. Beautiful, transportive books. Even politically risqué books. “This atmosphere was complemented by an unexpectedly rich library, where prisoners could even find Orwell or Machiavelli,” one former detainee told the human rights organisation Viasna this week. “Books became a lifeline. From the prison library and bookshop, I managed to access literature that helped me endure,” said Larysa Shchyrakova in an article she wrote for us last month. For her, one book in particular, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which details the Viennese neurologist’s experience in a Nazi concentration camp, became essential reading. A library in jail cuts both ways though. In some penal colonies the way to punish political prisoners is not to allow them access, so they have to risk further punishment by borrowing books from fellow inmates. Today, 21 May, is the International Day of Solidarity with Political Prisoners in Belarus. We’re thinking of all the 1,000-plus prisoners wrongfully detained and we’re especially thinking of our colleague Andrei Aliaksandraŭ. We don’t know exactly what his daily life is like – we haven’t been able to directly contact him in years – but we do hope that erudite and curious Andrei will not be one of the unlucky ones forbidden the solace of reading. By January this year, Andrei had spent five of his birthdays in prison. A journalist by training, who once worked for Index in our London office and later became a regular contributor from Belarus, Andrei was sentenced to 14 years on a charge of high treason several years ago. To mark the grim anniversary and to keep his case in the spotlight, we wrote this about him. We feel we have failed Andrei. Others have been released ahead of their full sentence. Andrei has not. That’s not through lack of trying. While our dreams to have his name flash up in his favourite Liverpool FC stadium have yet to materialise, we’ve managed to get Margaret Atwood, Nadya from Pussy Riot, Index chair Sir Trevor Phillips and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore to read lines from a poem he wrote from prison. We’ve sent letters to him and to politicians. We’ve published a letter of his too, written on the day of his trial. If anything gives a sense of his character – kind, generous, optimistic – it is this. But still, he is in prison. For doing nothing. No, for doing something heroic – helping protesters following the fraudulent election back in 2020. That’s not to say what we’ve done has been in vain. For Andrei and his family, there has been comfort in knowing he has not been forgotten, and comfort in the knowledge that one day he will walk free. We hope that day comes soon. READ MORE

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It will be no revelation when I say Belarus prisons are bleak. The conditions are dirty, the routines mind-numbing and the guards brutal. But perhaps this detail will surprise you: in the middle of some prisons are books. Beautiful, transportive books. Even politically risqué books. “This atmosphere was complemented by an unexpectedly rich library, where prisoners could even find Orwell or Machiavelli,” one former detainee told the human rights organisation Viasna this week. “Books became a lifeline. From the prison library and bookshop, I managed to access literature that helped me endure,” said Larysa Shchyrakova in an article she wrote for us last month. For her, one book in particular, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which details the Viennese neurologist’s experience in a Nazi concentration camp, became essential reading.

A library in jail cuts both ways though. In some penal colonies the way to punish political prisoners is not to allow them access, so they have to risk further punishment by borrowing books from fellow inmates.

Today, 21 May, is the International Day of Solidarity with Political Prisoners in Belarus. We’re thinking of all the 1,000-plus prisoners wrongfully detained and we’re especially thinking of our colleague Andrei Aliaksandraŭ. We don’t know exactly what his daily life is like – we haven’t been able to directly contact him in years – but we do hope that erudite and curious Andrei will not be one of the unlucky ones forbidden the solace of reading.

By January this year, Andrei had spent five of his birthdays in prison. A journalist by training, who once worked for Index in our London office and later became a regular contributor from Belarus, Andrei was sentenced to 14 years on a charge of high treason several years ago. To mark the grim anniversary and to keep his case in the spotlight, we wrote this about him.

We feel we have failed Andrei. Others have been released ahead of their full sentence. Andrei has not. That’s not through lack of trying. While our dreams to have his name flash up in his favourite Liverpool FC stadium have yet to materialise, we’ve managed to get Margaret Atwood, Nadya from Pussy Riot, Index chair Sir Trevor Phillips and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore to read lines from a poem he wrote from prison. We’ve sent letters to him and to politicians. We’ve published a letter of his too, written on the day of his trial. If anything gives a sense of his character – kind, generous, optimistic – it is this.

But still, he is in prison. For doing nothing. No, for doing something heroic – helping protesters following the fraudulent election back in 2020.

That’s not to say what we’ve done has been in vain. For Andrei and his family, there has been comfort in knowing he has not been forgotten, and comfort in the knowledge that one day he will walk free. We hope that day comes soon.

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Global Free Speech

Kurt Vonnegut and his daughter Nanette in 1997. Photo: Family handout This article first appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Index on Censorship, The monster unleashed: How Hungary’s illliberal vision is seducing the Western world published on 2 April 2026. “My mother warned me early on that my father was going to get in trouble for writing dirty books.” Nanette Vonnegut, youngest daughter of the late American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, remembers these words vividly. Even though she was around eight years old at the time, she recognised the real fear in her mother’s voice. At the time, she didn’t quite know what to do with the warning. But through a serendipitous encounter, she now has a much better idea. When she was invited, along with her brother, to represent the Vonnegut Estate at a meeting about book censorship hosted by publisher Penguin Random House, she had what she describes as a conversion experience. Now, she is taking on the State of Utah alongside other plaintiffs, in a case defending the freedom to read, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Utah Foundation. “I was blown away by the urgency,” she told Index, recalling the passion and bravery of the librarians and lawyers who spoke at the meeting. Each person took their turn to make a speech, “like one sermon after another”. Vonnegut spoke about her own childhood memories, when she was afraid of what might happen to her father. One speaker in particular, she remembered, described how book bans in the USA are not about words or even sex, but about ideas. “Not until now, did I ever feel afraid for what’s going on. These books in Utah are being thrown away. They’re just pulled off the shelves,” Vonnegut said. But this, she added, has always been a lurking threat. No sex please, we’re prudish At the meeting, she discovered that in Utah, any mention of sex in a book was sufficient reason for it to be pulled from any school library in the state. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, an anti-war novel first published in 1969, remains hugely controversial; it has already been banned in two school districts in Utah, labelled as pornographic. If the book is successfully challenged in a third district, the ban automatically becomes state-wide, as has already happened with 28 other books. Nanette Vonnegut can’t recall the book being particularly pornographic in nature. Interviewed on National Public Radio, Terry Hutchinson, a former member of a Utah schoolboard, said: “I am not a big Kurt Vonnegut fan. Not really because of subject matter, but because of style.” He believed that Slaughterhouse-Five should be removed from school libraries. For him, the book crossed the line when a character gets an erection. When Vonnegut and her attorney Tom Ford were invited to discuss the lawsuit on WHMP Radio, Ford explained that Utah’s book removal law, HB29 (passed in 2022 and amended in 2024), prohibits public school libraries from carrying any book that contains a description of a sex act. In Vonnegut v. Utah, the plaintiffs will argue that sections of HB29 are overbroad and in violation of First Amendment rights. “It prohibits a remarkably sweeping range of literature from every school library in the state,” Ford told the radio station. Appropriate age categories are irrelevant where this law is concerned – all sex is bad sex. The law itself, Ford said, springs from the false narrative created by conservative lawmakers in Utah that the state’s school libraries were full of pornographic books. In fact, Ford continued, the real targets of this censorship were ideas, messages and lived experiences. The earliest memory Vonnegut has of her father being a target of literary censorship is not one of quiet removal from a library shelf, but rather something more dramatic. In 1973, a school in Drake, North Dakota threw copies of Slaughterhouse-Five into its furnace. The books were burnt on the orders of the local school board, which had deemed the novel “profane”. Ironically, Vonnegut’s novel was inspired by his experiences as a prisoner of war in Germany during the Second World War. Before the war the Nazis had organised public burnings of books that they deemed “un-German”. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a letter to the school in response. “You can feel his rage and his hurt,” his daughter told Index, recalling the letter. Putting the Vonnegut name to good use Now, she said, she can’t believe that book banning is back in the USA, and “worse than ever”. She fears for the teenagers who don’t have access to the right resources and how much trouble it’s going to leave them in. For the first time, she feels she can really put her Vonnegut name to good use. Nanette Vonnegut grew up in a creative household, with her mother guarding the door to protect her father’s writing space. “You were scared of that door, because you knew that he was he was trying to write.” He worked hard, she remembered, all the time, and there was a sense that it was serious work. She described to Index how her father would come out from his writing for a snack (usually pumpernickel loaded with butter). The kitchen would be full of the kids and their friends, but he’d barely register them. Often, he would be muttering to himself; sometimes, he’d stop and talk to his youngest daughter, verbally working through an idea. Once, on his way back to his study, he paused and said to her: “You know, the unstructured life is not worth living.” Kurt rarely left the house. His wife, Jane Marie Cox, maintained the family’s social front by doing all the expected things like going to cocktail parties and playing tennis. She was his biggest supporter. Cox was passionate about reading too, and the Vonnegut house was always full of books. At the end of each day, the couple would discuss Vonnegut’s day of writing. “She was like his editor,” Nanette said, describing how when it came to stories, “she was the midwife.” A Vonnegut family trip Niagara Falls circa 1964. Photo: Family handout Memories of Slaughterhouse-Five Her father, she explained, was always writing to tell the truth. Slaughterhouse-Five was a particular challenge, because he struggled to get the information he needed about the fire-bombing of Dresden, which he had experienced. When he did finally finish the book, he left the galleys out for the children to read. When it was published, he became an overnight sensation. It was a writer’s house, and as the children got older, it became a party house too. According to Nanette Vonnegut, “It was a very heady, exciting time.” Her parents often had other creatives over at the Vonnegut home. Once, it was actor and director Peter Fonda, to talk about film rights for Vonnegut’s book Cat’s Cradle. Jack Kerouac, author of On The Road, visited before he was famous. After having a little too much to drink, his bad language ramped up. Nanette and a friend, aged around nine, were told to leave the room and go upstairs. “But we did not go upstairs,” she recalled. “We stayed behind the door. It was sort of thrilling and exciting. He was like a wild man, and he seemed to be a lot of fun. We didn’t want to miss any of it.” Growing up in this household, she internalised a strong faith in the creative process. She has inherited this “creative groove” as an artist. Take, for example, the day she snapped, for no particular reason, a photo of the Senate floor being shown on a television screen. A few days later, on 6 January 2021, came the US Capitol riot. Following her creativity, Vonnegut created a huge six-foot painting (opposite) from the photograph. Although mostly found in her art studio, Vonnegut feels a strong sense of the power of words, and is a writer too. “Words are the most sacred things that we have, and that’s something I grew up with,” she told Index. And above all, evident in her fight against Utah, she has always taken for granted the belief that there are no “dirty words”. READ MORE

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