List of memoirs of political prisoners
A memoir is an autobiographical writing normally dealing with a particular subject from the author's life. The following is a list of writers who have described their experiences of being political prisoners. Those included in the list are individuals who were imprisoned for activities ranging from peaceful dissent to violent revolutionary activity. Some were citizens of the countries whose regimes imprisoned them and others were foreign nationals. What connects them is that they have written about their experience of having been imprisoned because of their political opposition or political identity.
Note, too, that the list omits many autobiographies which deal, only in part, with a period of political imprisonment; and includes some in which imprisonment forms a major part of the book.
- Henri Alleg, author of The Question. 1958. New York: George Braziller.
- Nicolae Constantin Batzaria, author of În închisorile turcești. 1921.
- Alexander Berkman, author of Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. 1999. New York: New York Review of Books Classics.
- Francois Bizot, author of The Gate. 2003. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
- Brendan Behan, author of Borstal Boy. 2000. David R. Godine. Note that Borstal Boy is one of comparatively few memoirs written by a juvenile political prisoner.
- Breyten Breytenbach, author of The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. 1985. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux.
- Vartouhie Calantar-Nalbandian, confined in Constantinople's Central Prison from 1915 to 1917, serialised her prison memoirs in the Armenian feminist journal Hay Gin. Hers is the only known first person narrative of an Ottoman prisoner and is the earliest known women's prison memoir in the Middle East.
- Nien Cheng, author of Life and Death in Shanghai. 1987. London: Grafton Books.
- Stuart Christie, author of Granny Made Me An Anarchist: General Franco, The Angry Brigade and Me. 2004. London: Simon & Schuster.
- Lena Constante. 1995. The Silent Escape: Three Thousand Days in Romanian Prisons. Trans: Franklin Philip. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN|0-88264-335-5ISBN|0-920862-17-9ISBN|978-0-316-32868-5ISBN|0-06-013914-5ISBN|0-87348-143-7