Arundhati Roy has received the PEN Pinter Prize for 2024, an annual accolade established by English PEN in 2009 to honor the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter. She is set to receive the award during a ceremony on October 10, co-hosted by the British Library, where she will also deliver a speech.
The award is presented each year to a writer of exceptional literary talent residing in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, or the Commonwealth. This writer, in line with Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize in Literature speech, must exhibit an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ perspective on the world, demonstrating a fierce intellectual resolve to define the real truth of our lives and societies.
The panel for this year’s award included Ruth Borthwick, who chairs English PEN, along with actor Khalid Abdalla and writer Roger Robinson. Past recipients of the award have included notable figures such as Michael Rosen, Margaret Atwood, Malorie Blackman, Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard, and Carol Ann Duffy.
Borthwick congratulated her and remarked “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.”
Abdalla praised Roy as a luminous voice for freedom and justice, speaking with fierce clarity and determination for nearly thirty years. He said, “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’.”
He added, “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 honoring 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.”
Robinson praised Roy’s incisive commentary on environmental degradation and human rights abuses, highlighting her advocacy for the marginalized and challenge to the status quo. “Her unique voice and unwavering dedication to these causes make her a deserving recipient of this honor.”
On her part, Roy said that she is 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,’ she said.
Earlier this month, Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena authorized the prosecution of author Arundhati Roy and former Central University of Kashmir professor Sheikh Showkat Hussain under the rigorous Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. The two had allegedly made provocative speeches at a conference organized under the banner of ‘Azadi – The Only Way’ on October 21, 2010, in New Delhi.
