Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024 at a ceremony held at the British Library in London on Thursday, October 10.
The prize-winner shares the PEN Pinter Prize 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. Roy named British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah as the ‘Writer of Courage 2024’.
‘Why did I choose the jailed writer and blogger Alaa Abd el-Fattah as the Writer of Courage to share the PEN Pinter Prize with? For the same reason that Egyptian authorities have chosen to keep him in prison for two more years instead of releasing him last month. Because his voice is as beautiful as it is dangerous. Because his understanding of what we are facing today is as sharp as a dagger’s edge.’
Alaa Abd el-Fattah, the British-Egyptian writer, software developer, and activist, is one of the most prominent political prisoners in Egypt and has spent most of the past decade behind bars. He was most recently arrested in 2019 and was sentenced in December 2021 after spending two years in pre-trial detention. Despite completing his unjust five-year sentence on 29 September 2024, the Egyptian authorities have refused to release him, failing to account for the time he spent in pre-trial detention, in defiance of international legal norms and Egypt’s criminal law.
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.’
~ Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN
In her address, Roy said, “Why did I choose the jailed writer and blogger Alaa Abd el-Fattah as the Writer of Courage to share the PEN Pinter Prize with? For the same reason that Egyptian authorities have chosen to keep him in prison for two more years instead of releasing him last month.
“Because his voice is as beautiful as it is dangerous. Because his understanding of what we are facing today is as sharp as a dagger’s edge.”
The PEN Pinter Prize was established in 2009 by the charity English PEN, which defends freedom of expression and celebrates literature, in memory of Nobel-Laureate playwright Harold Pinter. 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’.
Arundhati Roy further announced that her share of the prize money will be donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.
