The crowd is a little thinner in the Peppers Theatre for the first of Amnesty International's daily Imprisoned Writers series at the Edinburgh book festival, but there is plenty of passion as Chenjerai Hove begins with a poem from Blind Moon.
His right hand traces arabesques in the air as he reads, dipping and weaving with the rise and fall of the line.
He usually turns down invitations to talk about freedom of expression he says, because he believes that "everybody in the world has freedom of expression. What we need, what we fight for is freedom after expression."
Journalist Jon Lee Anderson tells the stories of some of the writers he has met "who have yet to be imprisoned" because they dare not even begin to write, and reads an anonymous poem written in jail by an Iranian prisoner and committed to paper by Farkhondeh Ashena on her release. Biographer Lyndall Gordon presents Francisco Santos' clear-eyed analysis of problems of journalism in Colombia, while Jonathan Stroud introduces a poem by Syrian poet Faraj Bayraqdar with an account of how he smuggled his work out of jail on cigarette papers rolled up inside carved pieces of wood or in cakes.
"A festival like this one is a celebration of writing, but it is also a celebration of audiences," says Stroud. "Communication requires two sides. Bayraqdar, deprived of physical liberty in prison was robbed of his audience also, and his audience, wherever they were, was robbed of him. By becoming an audience for the work of imprisoned writers, we're helping to assault the walls that surround them."
The Imprisoned Writers series continues daily, with Margaret Atwood, Jack Mapanje, Clare Short, Iain Banks and Michel Faber reading work by Vaclav Havel, Aung San Suu Kyi, Raul Rivero and Ken Saro-Wiwa alongside a host of others.
