Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy wins the 2024 PEN Pinter Prize
Award and Honour
4 min read
Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy has been chosen for the 2024 PEN Pinter Literary Prize for her courageous and unswerving writing. The award to Arundhati Roy comes after the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, V.K. Saxena, sanctioned her prosecution under the preventive detention law Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967 this month.
Arundhati Roy will receive her award at a ceremony to be held in October in London, England.
Arundhati Roy joins a list of literary giants like Salaman Rushdie, Margret Atwood, Tom Stoppard, Carol Ann Duffy and Malorie Blackman, who have previously won the prize.
PEN Pinter Award
The PEN(Poet, Playwright, Editors Essayist, Novelist) Pinter Award was instituted in memory of playwright Harold Pinter in 2009. Harold Pinter, who was a citizen of Great Britain, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.
The annual award is given to a writer who is a resident of the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, or the Commonwealth. The award is given to "outstanding literary merit" writers who cast their “unflinching” gaze on the world.
The award is given to writers in the English language who have produced outstanding literary work in plays, poetry, essays, or fiction.
Arundhati Roy was selected for this year's award by a panel comprising English PEN chair Ruth Borthwick, actor Khalid Abdalla and writer Roger Robinson.
The PEN Pinter jury praised Arundhati Roy’s literary work for her incisive commentary on wide-ranging issues ranging from environmental degradation to human rights abuses.
About Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy is the first Indian to win the prestigious Booker Prize in 1997 for her fiction ‘The God of Small Things’.
Her second novel, ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ was published in 2017.
She is also the author of Capitalism: A Ghost Story and The Algebra of Infinite Justice.
She has written against the abuse of human rights, war and capitalism. She is an outspoken critic of the Narendra Modi government and has spoken about India's declining press freedoms during its tenure.
She faces prosecution for her comment made at an event in New Delhi in 2010 for saying that Kashmir was never an integral part of India.
