The PEN Pinter Prize 2024: Arundhati Roy

This event takes place in the British Library Pigott Theatre and will be simultaneously live streamed on the British Library platform. Tickets may be booked either to attend in person, or to watch on our platform (online) either live or within 48 hours on catch up. Viewing links will be sent out shortly before the event.

At this event writer Arundhati Roy is awarded the prestigious PEN Pinter Prize for 2024. She delivers her keynote address at a ceremony hosted by English PEN and 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 Roy from a shortlist of cases supported by English PEN, will be announced at the event.

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. The prize is awarded 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’. 

Former winners of the PEN Pinter Prize include Michael Rosen, Malorie Blackman, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie,  Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi. 

Discounts available for British Library Members. Half price tickets available for students, under 26s and other concession groups. 

Doors and bar open at 18.00. If you’re attending in person please arrive no later than 15 minutes before the start time of this event.

Arundhati Roy was born in Meghalaya state in north eastern India and trained as an architect. She worked in cinema as an actor, screenplay writer and production designer. In 1997 she won the Booker Prize for her first novel The God of Small Things which was translated into more than 40 languages. Her second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) has been translated into more than 50 languages. Her non-fiction books include Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014), Broken Republic: Three Essays (2011), Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (2009), The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002), The Doctor and the Saint (2013), My Seditious Heart (2018) and Azadi: Freedom, Fiction, Fascism. (2019) and her latest book is The Architecture of Modern Empire (2024). She has been honoured with the Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing (2011), the Sydney Peace Prize (2004), the Mahmoud Darwaish Award (2016) and the Lannan Foundation's Cultural Freedom Award (2002). 

English PEN is one of the world's oldest human rights organisations and the founding centre of PEN International, a worldwide writers’ association with 147 centres in more than 100 countries. The charity works to promote literature and to defend freedom of expression in the UK and internationally. Harold Pinter (1930 - 2008) was a Vice President of English PEN. He visited Turkey on behalf of PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee with Arthur Miller in 1985 where they were accompanied by Orhan Pamuk

The PEN Pinter Prize is supported by the generosity of Faber and Ruth Maxted.

Image of Arundhati Roy © Mayank Austen Soofi