Major authors join PEN International appeal for Turkey to end Twitter ban

Letter from Zadie Smith, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie and other writers says Turkey's social media ban is an "unacceptable violation of the right to freedom of speech"

Turkey's Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has said that the situation in his country "is going from bad to worse and even towards terrible" following the government's attempts to block access to Twitter, as a phalanx of major writers, from Zadie Smith to Günter Grass, line up to state their "grave concern" about "the freedom of words" in Turkey today.

The authors, who also include Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Grass and Pamuk's fellow Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, have added their names to a joint letter from PEN International and English PEN which calls last week's ban on Twitter "an unacceptable violation of the right to freedom of speech". The Turkish government restricted access to the micro-blogging website, and prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoan indicated the ban could be extended further, saying he would not "leave this nation at the mercy of YouTube and Facebook" and pledging to "take the necessary steps in the strongest way".