On April, 2024, this years’ judges Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN; Khalid Abdalla, actor and activist; and Roger Robinson, writer and musician has chosen Arundhati Roy as the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize winner. According to the englishpen.org website, Arundhati will receive the award in a ceremony co-hosted by the British Library on 10th October, 2024, where she will deliver an address.
English Pen has also stated that the prize will be shared with, ‘a Writer of Courage: a writer who is active in defence of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty.’ The co-winner will be selected by Arundhati Roy from a shortlist of cases supported by English PEN, which will be announced at the event.
‘Our congratulations to Arundhati Roy on winning the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. Roy tells urgent stories of injustice with wit and beauty. While India remains an important focus, she is truly an internationalist thinker, and her powerful voice is not to be silenced,’ expressed Ruth Borthwick.
Khalid Abdalla also commented, “Arundhati Roy is a luminous voice of freedom and justice whose words have come with fierce clarity and determination for almost thirty years now. Her books, her writings, the spirit with which her life is lived, have been a lodestar through the many crises and the darkness our world has faced since her first book, The God of Small Things.”
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“In honouring Arundhati Roy this year, we are celebrating both the dignity of her body of work and the timeliness of her words, that arrive with the depth of her craft exactly when we need them most,” added Khalid.
Arundhati Roy commented, “I am delighted to accept the PEN Pinter prize. I wish Harold Pinter were with us today to write about the almost incomprehensible turn the world is taking. Since he isn’t, some of us must do our utmost to try to fill his shoes.”
The PEN Pinter Prize was established in 2009 in memory of Harold Pinter Harold Pinter. The PEN Pinter Prize is awarded annually to a writer resident in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth or former Commonwealth who, in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech, casts an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world, and shows a ‘fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies’.
According to englishpen.org, the winner must be an author of a significant body of plays, poetry, essays, or fiction of outstanding literary merit, written in English. It has also been stated that, ‘the prize is shared with a writer of courage selected by English PEN’s Writers at Risk Committee in association with the winner. This half of the prize is awarded to someone who has been persecuted for speaking out about their beliefs.’ The PEN Pinter Prize is said to be supported by the generosity of Faber and Ruth Maxted.
Excerpts from website:
https://www.englishpen.org/prizes/pen-pinter-prize/
https://www.englishpen.org/posts/campaigns/arundhati-roy-awarded-pen-pinter-prize-2024/
