Renowned author Arundhati Row, who is facing prosecution threat under the stringent UAPA over comments made on Kashmir years ago, on Thursday received the prestigious Pen Pinter Prize 2024 for her “unflinching and unswerving” writings.
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 Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
Arundhati Roy, a Booker Prize winner, and former professor Hussain are accused of delivering provocative speeches at an event in Delhi in 2010 where Kashmir’s secession from India was allegedly discussed.
Arundhati Roy Gets Pen Pinter Prize 2024
Arundhati Roy expressed her delight at being named this year's Pen pinter Prize winner amid an “incomprehensible turn” the world is taking. The prize, established in 2009 by the charity English PEN, defends freedom of expression and celebrates literature in memory of Nobel-Laureate playwright Harold Pinter.
"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,” said 62-year-old Arundhati Roy.
Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for her debut novel ‘The God of Small Things’.
Roy was chosen by this year’s judges – Chair of English PEN Ruth Borthwick; actor and activist Khalid Abdalla; and writer and musician Roger Robinson. She will receive the award at a ceremony co-hosted by the British Library on October 10, where she will also deliver an address.
“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,” a news agency report quoted PTI Borthwick as saying.
“Arundhati Roy is a luminous voice of freedom and justice whose words have come with fierce clarity and determination for almost 30 years now,” said Abdalla.
The prize will be shared with a “Writer of Courage” – one 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 and announced by Arundhati Roy from a shortlist of cases supported by English PEN.
The prize is given 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”.
