Arundhati Roy wins PEN Pinter prize

Indian author 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, 62, 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.

Roy is an outspoken writer and activist and could face prosecution by the Narendra Modi government for comments she made in 2010 about Kashmir - a controversial topic in India.

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.”

Roy has written numerous books and non-fiction essays, but she is best known for her novel, The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997.

(With inputs from Hindustan Times, BBC)