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Ursula Owen has been a significant figure in the worlds of literature and free expression since the 1970s. A founding director of Virago Press in 1974, later becoming Joint Managing Director, she worked with a committed team as the company rapidly developed an international reputation, rediscovering and repositioning women writers and, over two decades, transforming both the literary canon and the contemporary publishing world.During the 1990s, Owen became a director of the Paul Hamlyn Fund, Cultural Policy Advisor to the Labour Party and Chief Executive of Index on Censorship. Yet behind these and other signal achievements lies the story of a refugee, a child who fled the Nazis, was educated at Putney High School, went up to Oxford, trained as a researcher in social services, travelled extensively, marrying, becoming a mother, and eventually separating. In this frank and compelling memoir, we discover an extraordinary life where culture prevails against the tumultuous conflicts of the twentieth-century, as well as the twenty-first.

A slender, realistic story of a young man's coming of age, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else is one of the most inspiring novels Ursula K. Le Guin ever published. Owen is seventeen and smart. He knows what he wants to do with his life. But then he meets Natalie and he realizes he doesn't know anything much at all. “Like all Le Guin’s work, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else is about the invisible structures of society and about the challenge to live honestly. On a Sunday years ago I was lucky to encounter a book that could show me the breadth our lives have—that the discovery of what leads us on is better than the goal of perfection.” —Emily Schultz, Bustle “An engaging, well written novel.” —New York Times

Seventeen-year-old Owen Griffiths learns to find his own way to a future in science through a friendship with a girl whose life is dedicated to music

Examines the role of the American artist in the mid-1990s. With emerging resistance to government funding, artists are taking different approaches in order to survive, including self-censorship and alternative outlets for expression.

How do the state, the market, religious fundamentalism, self-censorship and marginalization operate to undermine the freedom of the press? This work takes a global view of the current state of unfreedom in book publishing including the rules in Nigeria, Turkey, the USA and the Middle East.

In this issue of Index on Censorship, the topics covered include the plight of the disabled in Africa, the speech that kills, Germany's new Nazis and Zero Tolerance in Russia.