al-Maqtari receives the award for "her unwavering resistance to all forms of oppression and tyranny and for her outstanding courage in giving a voice to the civilians whose lives have been shattered by the devastation of war in Yemen", according to the motivation.
The author has, among other things, collected 400 testimonies from the war's victims, which are described in her book "What did you leave behind? Voices from Yemen's forgotten war". After a fatwa against her, Bushra al-Maqtari can no longer move freely in her home country, but she has not fled Yemen.
"In times of war and conflict, testimonies are necessary for our understanding of what is happening. Bushra al-Maqtari's tireless work with just this has given us a picture of war-torn Yemen that would otherwise have been lost," says Swedish PEN's chairman Kerstin Almegård in a press release.
The Tucholsky Award is a freedom of expression award of 150,000 kronor.
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