Arundhati Roy wins PEN Pinter Prize 2024, jury says ‘her powerful voice not to be silenced’

Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024, an annual award set up in 2009 by English PEN in memory of Nobel laureate playwright Harold Pinter.

Roy will receive the award in a ceremony co-hosted by the British Library on October 10. She will also deliver an address.

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.

Congratulating Roy, Borthwick said that the author tells urgent stories of injustice with wit and beauty.

‘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,’ Borthwick remarked.

Abdalla said that Roy is a luminous voice of freedom and justice whose words have come with fierce clarity and determination for almost thirty years now.

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“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’,” Abdallasaid.

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 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.”

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Robinson said that Roy’s incisive commentary on issues ranging from environmental degradation to human rights abuses demonstrates her commitment to advocating for the marginalized and challenging the status quo.

“Her unique voice and unwavering dedication to these causes make her a deserving recipient of this honour,” he added.

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 approved prosecuting author Arundhati Roy and former Central University of Kashmir professor Sheikh Showkat Hussain under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

The two had allegedly made provocative speeches at a conference organised under the banner of ‘Azadi - The Only Way’ on October 21, 2010, in New Delhi.