Renowned writer and activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter prize for the year 2024. She will receive the award in a ceremony that is scheduled to be held on October 10, 2024. The award has been announced merely weeks after the top official in the Delhi administration accorded sanction to prosecute her under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for a speech she made 14 years ago.
PEN Pinter prize and the Pinter International Writer of Courage awards were instituted by the English PEN, a non profit organization that defends freedom of expression and celebrates literature, in memory of Nobel Literature Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter. The award is given to those who, in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize in Literature speech, cast an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze upon the world and show a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.
Chair of English PEN Ruth Borthwick congratulated Roy and 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.”
Actor and activist Khalid Abdalla, who was one of the three judges this year, called Roy “a luminous voice of freedom and justice whose words have come with fierce clarity and determination for almost thirty years now.” “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,” he added. The third judge writer and musician Roger Robinson said that she was selected unanimously.
Responding to the award, Arundhati Roy said, “I am 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.”
Arundhati will share her 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. The co-winner will be selected by Arundhati Roy from a shortlist of cases supported by English PEN and will be announced at the event in October 2024.
Earlier in June, Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena gave a sanction to prosecute Arundhati Roy and a former professor from Kashmir Sheik Showkat Hussain for allegedly saying that Kashmir was never part of India and was forcibly annexed, while speaking at a conference in New Delhi in 2010.