Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024, an annual award established in 2009 by English PEN in memory of Nobel laureate playwright Harold Pinter. The announcement comes two weeks after Indian officials granted permission to prosecute the writer over comments she made 14 years ago
The prize is awarded annually to a writer of outstanding literary merit resident in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland or the Commonwealth, who in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize in Literature 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’.
This year’s jury for the award comprised English PEN chair Ruth Borthwick, actor Khalid Abdalla, and writer Roger Robinson. Previous winners of the award include Michael Rosen, Margaret Atwood, Malorie Blackman, Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard and Carol Ann Duffy.
