It has been one year today since the world’s first openly gay imam, Muhsin Hendricks, was murdered in South Africa on 15 February 2025. To date, there have been no arrests, demonstrating once more the impunity with which hatred and violence against members of the LGBTQI+ community in South Africa are met. To mark the first anniversary of Hendricks’ murder, Unwritten Lives is today reposting Muriithi Kariuki's seminal essay on the routine silence and everyday erasure that underpin homophobic violence. "The destruction of queer lives does not begin with a hammer, a bullet, or a judge’s gavel … It begins with silence. With isolation. With erasure."
A nihilistic political thriller about the obliteration of an American family when a new girlfriend’s authoritarian ideas rip them apart
Sami al-Saei has defied social stigma to speak out about what a report calls a ‘grave pattern’ of sexual violence in Israeli prisons
For a snapshot of the authoritarian era to which today’s launch of Unwritten Lives is a response, we don’t have to rewind too far, just to the recent past, to moments that still reside fresh in recent memory.
Ishtiyaq Shukri is the award-winning author of The Silent Minaret, I See You, and An Unwritten Life. …
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