• Noted Indian author Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2024. She will receive the award in a ceremony co-hosted by the British Library on October 10, 2024.

• This year’s jury for the award comprised English PEN chair Ruth Borthwick, actor Khalid Abdalla, and writer Roger Robinson. 

• Arundhati Roy is truly an internationalist thinker, and her powerful voice is not to be silenced, the jury said.

• Roy, a Booker Prize-winning author, was honoured with the Prize for her “unflinching and unswerving” writings.

• The announcement comes weeks after authorities accorded sanction to prosecute Roy under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for allegedly making provocative speeches at an event in 2010.

• Arundhati Roy is the author of ‘The God of Small Things’, which won the Booker Prize in 1997 and has been translated into more than 40 languages.

• She also wrote ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize 2017. Roy has also published several works of non-fiction, including ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice’, ‘Listening to Grasshoppers’ and ‘Broken Republic’. 

• She was born in 1959. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives.

PEN Pinter Prize

• The PEN Pinter Prize was established in 2009 by the charity English PEN, which defends freedom of expression and celebrates literature, in memory of Nobel-Laureate playwright Harold Pinter. 

• Harold Pinter, who died at the age of 78 in 2008, was a famous British dramatist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005.

• The Prize is awarded annually to a writer of outstanding literary merit resident in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland or the Commonwealth.

• Previous winners of the award include Michael Rosen, Margaret Atwood, Malorie Blackman, Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard and Carol Ann Duffy.

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