Leila Aboulela was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2025 at the English PEN’s summer party in London, UK, on Wednesday, July 9, 2025.
The PEN Pinter Prize is awarded annually to a writer from Britain, the Republic of Ireland, or the Commonwealth who, in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize-winning 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’. Some of those who have won it since 2009 have been Alaa Abd el-Fattah, Malorie Blackman, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Lemn Sissay, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The jury for 2025 of Ruth Borthwick, Mona Arshi, and Nadifa Mohamed selected this year’s recipient, Leila Aboulela, for her writing on migration, faith, and the lives of women.
“Aboulela’s work “is marked by a commitment to make the lives and decisions of Muslim women central to her fiction, and to examine their struggles and pleasures with dignity,” said novelist Nadifa Mohamed.
English PEN chair Ruth Borthwick said, “In a world seemingly on fire, and with immense suffering unmarked and little mourned in Sudan, Gaza, and beyond, her writing is a balm, a shelter, and an inspiration.”
Leila Aboulela said: ‘This comes as a complete and utter surprise. Thank you English PEN and the judges for considering my work worthy of this award. I am honoured to win a prize established in memory of Harold Pinter, a great writer who continues to inspire so much loyalty and consistent high regard. For someone like me, a Muslim Sudanese immigrant who writes from a religious perspective probing the limits of secular tolerance, this recognition feels truly significant. It brings expansion and depth to the meaning of freedom of expression and whose stories get heard.’
She will receive the award on 10 October at the British Library in London, where she will announce her choice of winner for the PEN Pinter Writer of Courage award, given to an author “active in defence of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty”.
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