Indian author, Arundhati Roy has become the latest prize-winning novelist to sign an international protest demanding the release of imprisoned Turkish writers. Roy’s best-selling 1997 novel, The God of Small Things won the Booker prize, the English-speaking world’s most prestigious literary award. Her signature brings to 11 the number of Booker prize-winners, including the South African writer J.M. Coetzee who won on two separate occasions as well as the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003. Another signatory, Salman Rushdie, won “the Booker of Bookers” in 1993 to celebrate the first 25 years of the prize.

The letter expresses alarm at the detention under emergency regulations of journalists like Şahin Alpay, Nazlı Ilıcak or the novelist Aslı Erdoğan whom are described as “outspoken defenders of democracy.” It expresses particular alarm at the detention of novelist Ahmet Altan, and his economist brother, Mehmet Altan, on grounds that they gave “subliminal” encouragement to the plotters of the abortive 15 July military coup.

Other Booker winners to sign the letter include John Berger, Peter Carey, AS Byatt, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Michael Ondaatje, DPC Pierre and Margaret Atwood. Nobel prize winners Orhan Pamuk and Herta Müller are also on the list. There are also renowned writers in other languages from the Italian best-selling Elena Ferrante to the Argentinean Alberto Manguel. The list also includes the American poet John Ashbery, the popular writers for a younger audience Philip Pullman (winner of the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Prize and the Astrid Lindgren Award) and Neil Gaiman who has won multiple literary prizes including the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, the Newbery and Carnegie medals and the 2013 British National Book Award.

To date the list has grown to include some 270 academics, publishers, writers along with cinema stars and stage actors. Even within the last 24 hours some thirty prominent thinkers, including Yale University political theorist Prof. Seyla Benhabib and the Turkish sociologist İsmail Beşikci joined the protest. Andrew Solomon, president of PEN America also signed.