Robert Sharp

When I worked for English PEN there were occasions where someone for whom we had campaigned, whose face I had printed onto hundreds of banners and posters, would walk into our office, free. It was a jarring experience, like seeing a celebrity on the tube.

When I met the Syrian journalist Mazen Darwish, I wrote:

I’ll also say that it’s a strange experience to meet in person someone for whom one has campaigned. We used the same old photo of Mazen for all our tweets and news releases and posters. The person becomes a symbol, an icon, a cipher. When I saw him sitting on the bench chuckling and smoking a cigarette, sweating a little in the London heat, there was a moment of dissonance, as if a fictitious character had become incarnate.

It’s different for him, of course. Even while unseen in Adra prison, Mazen was always very real, all flesh, vulnerable to torture, at risk of death. And Yara, so used to her husband’s physical presence in their house and their work, must have felt his absence deeply.

With Andrei Aliaksandrau it was different. A flesh and blood man who I had campaigned alongside, drank pints with, bantered with, suddenly two-Dimensional on a campaign poster. It’s fantastic to hear that he has been released from prison in Belarus, and that perhaps we will one day see him in three dimensions again.