Renowned novelist Arundhati Roy, was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024 for her fearless literary contributions. Arundhati who won the Booker Prize in 1997 for ‘The God of Small Things’, faces prosecution threat under the UAPA over comments on Kashmir 14 years ago.
Arundhati Roy. (Photo: Instagram)
Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy has been awarded the prestigious PEN Pinter Prize 2024 for her “unflinching and unswerving” writings. The PEN Pinter Prize was established in 2009 in memory of Nobel laureate playwright 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’,” states the website of PEN Pinter Prize.
The winner must be the author of a significant body of plays, poetry, essays, or fiction of outstanding literary merit, written in English. “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 co-winner, selected by Arundhati Roy from a shortlist of cases supported by English PEN, will be announced at the event on 10 October 2024.
Arundhati Roy was chosen as the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize winner in April 2024 by this year’s judges: Chair of English PEN, Ruth Borthwick; actor and activist Khalid Abdalla; and writer and musician Roger Robinson.
In a statement published on the official website of the PEN Pinter Prize, Arundhati expressed her joy and said, “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 novelist who won the Booker Prize for her debut novel The God of Small Things, is currently facing prosecution threat under the UAPA over historic comments on Kashmir 14 years ago.
“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,” said Borthwick.
The jury called her a “luminous voice of freedom and justice”. “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. This year, as the world faces the deep histories that have created this moment in Gaza, our need for writers who are “unflinching and unswerving” has been immense. 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,” commented Abdalla.
