Fighting for freedom in Index on Censorship

Rachael Jolley is the editor of Index on Censorship, the 47-year-old title dedicated to promoting freedom of expression. Founded in London in 1972 by the poet Stephen Spender and the translator Michael Scammell, it now boasts a truly global readership thanks in large part to its distribution via 9,000 universities around the world.

Rachael has been in the editor’s chair for the last five years, and in this conversation she speaks about the changes she has made in that time, cultivating a network of contributing editors in countries like Turkey, Mexico and China that allows the magazine to give a local perspective from places that can be difficult to report on. And she’s also keen to emphasise that freedom of expression is not just a problem in faraway places, pointing to the disturbing development of journalists being killed for their work in European countries like Malta and Slovakia.

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indexoncensorship.org