The little I heard from the people on the writers' negotiating committee is that they walked into the room, and there were only corporate lawyers there on the other side.
Why, after all, do we get so worked up about which writer a committee of Swedish intellectuals chooses to anoint in any given year?
The fact is that at the moment almost any writer the committee chose to name would feel like a comment on the state of the world.
Most of the white writers serving this committee also got any number of paying jobs to do patriotic scripts.
The Writers in Prison Committee was formally set up in 1960, and has been going strong ever since.
Pakistan-born Kamila Shamsie and India-born Salil Tripathi are co-chairs of English PEN's Writers at Risk committee.
At International PEN, director of the Writers in Prison committee Sara Whyatt said it was "extremely unlikely" there would be a positive outcome for the complainants.
The director of the Writers in Prison Committee at International PEN, Sara Wyatt, praised the role of the Italian government so far.
The director of the writers in prison committee at International PEN, Sara Whyatt, described a "small but noisy" nationalist demonstration, which took place outside the court.
This week saw the publication of Freedom of Expression in Cuba, a briefing paper for journalists, from the Writers in Prison Committee of English PEN.
