Norwegian PEN's Ossietzky Prize for "outstanding achievements within the field of free expression" will be awarded to Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer during the commemoration of the Day of the Imprisoned Writer.  The prize will be awarded at an evening event at the House of Literature in Oslo on 16. November.  Norwegian PEN will also award its first honorary prize to its former president, translator Kjell Olaf Jensen.  During this event, the newly arrived "writer of refuge" in the city of Oslo, Kenyan writer Philo Ikonya, will read from her own texts.

The program for the event also includes a short lecture by Mohammed Omer, speeches to the prize recipients by editor Alf van der Hagen (Omer) and Norwegian PEN president Anders Heger (Jensen), as well as an account covering the five writers to be focused on during this commemo-ration, by the chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of Norwegian PEN, Trine Kleven.

Mohammed Omer (25) is a Palestinian journalist who has written for the Norwegian weekly "Morgenbladet" and worked for the "Norwegian People´s Aid" in Gaza.  He also writes for international media including the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Electronic Intifada, The Nation, and Inter Press Service.  In 2008, Omer was awarded the 2007 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. In the award citation, Omer was honored as "the voice of the voiceless" and his reports were described as a "humane record of the injustice imposed on a community forgotten by much of the world."

While traveling back from the prize ceremony in London to the Gaza Strip, Omer reported that he was stripped to his underwear, humiliated and beaten by Israeli soldiers. He was subsequently hospitalized upon his return to Gaza, where it was discovered that Omer had sustained several broken ribs and various bodily contusions as a result of the ordeal.  He is now undergoing medical treatment in the Netherlands.

Prior to the price ceremony in Oslo, Omer was on a tour of the U.S., lecturing about his experiences and the situation in Gaza at such high-ranking universities as Harvard and MIT.

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