New Delhi

Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. The annual award was set up in 2009 by English PEN in memory of Nobel laureate playwright Harold Pinter.

Roy is a Booker Prize-winning author and has written about human rights issues in India as well as war and capitalism globally.

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The author will be honoured at a ceremony co-hosted by the British Library on October 10 later this year. She will also deliver an address.

The annual award is given to a writer of outstanding literary merit residing 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 award jury comprised English PEN chair Ruth Borthwick, actor Khalid Abdalla, and writer Roger Robinson. 

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Previous award winners include prominent authors like Michael Rosen, Margaret Atwood, Malorie Blackman, Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard and Carol Ann Duffy.

Roy has said that she is "delighted" to have been awarded this year's PEN Pinter Prize.

English PEN chair Ruth Borthwick praised Roy for telling "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."

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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 fill his shoes."