Arundhati Roy is the 2024 winner of the PEN Pinter Prize which was set up in 2009 by English PEN in memory of Nobel laureate playwright Harold Pinter. Roy will receive the prize on October 10, 2024 in a ceremony co-hosted by the British Library.
The 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”. This year’s jury comprised English PEN chair Ruth Borthwick, actor Khalid Abdalla, and writer Roger Robinson.
Borthwick said, “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.” Abdalla added that Roy is a “luminous voice of freedom and justice”, and that her works “have been a lodestar through the many crises and the darkness our world has faced”.
On winning the prize, Roy said: “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.”
Previous winners include Michael Rosen, Malorie Blackman, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard and Carol Ann Duffy.
