New Delhi: Author Arundhati Roy was on Thursday awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024, an annual award set up in 2009 in memory of Nobel laureate playwright Harold Pinter, for her “unflinching and unswerving” writings.
Roy will receive the award in a ceremony on October 10. It will be co-hosted by the British Library.
The prize will be shared 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, selected by Arundhati Roy from a shortlist of cases supported by English PEN, will be announced at the event on 10 October 2024, English Pen wrote on its website.
Set up by English PEN, the prize is awarded annually to a writer of outstanding literary merit who as said by Pinter in his 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’.
The author, however, should be a resident of the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, or the Commonwealth.
Roy was selected by a jury comprising English PEN chair Ruth Borthwick, actor Khalid Abdalla and writer Roger Robinson.
The award has earlier been given to authors Michael Rosen, Margaret Atwood, Malorie Blackman, Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard and Carol Ann Duffy.
The award has come while Arundhanti is facing prosecution under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for provocative speeches made at a conference organised under the banner of ‘Azadi – The Only Way’ on October 21, 2010, in New Delhi.