Alaa Abd el-Fattah was selected by PEN Pinter Prize 2024 winner Arundhati Roy to be this year’s co-winner in London, UK on Thursday, October 10, 2024.
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 Malorie Blackman, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Lemn Sissay, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Sir Salman Rushdie, and Hanif Kureishi.
For 2024, the PEN Pinter Prize 2024 winner Arundhati Roy was selected by a jury of English PEN Chair Ruth Borthwick; actor and activist Khalid Abdalla; and writer and musician Roger Robinson in July. The celebrated Indian writer was to be feted at the British Museum where she would announce the “Writer of Courage.” The Writer of Courage is awarded to an author who is active in defence of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty, and shares the PEN Pinter Prize with the winner.
This year’s “Writer of Courage” selected by Roy in cooperation with English PEN is Alaa Abd el-Fattah. The British-Egyptian writer, software developer, and activist, is one of the most prominent political prisoners in Egypt and has spent most of the past decade behind bars. He was most recently arrested in 2019 and was sentenced in December 2021 after spending two years in pre-trial detention. Despite completing his unjust five-year sentence on 29 September 2024, the Egyptian authorities have refused to release him, failing to account for the time he spent in pre-trial detention, in defiance of international legal norms and Egypt’s criminal law.
Roy, said: ‘Why did I choose the jailed writer and blogger Alaa Abd el-Fattah as the Writer of Courage to share the PEN Pinter Prize with? For the same reason that Egyptian authorities have chosen to keep him in prison for two more years instead of releasing him last month. Because his voice is as beautiful as it is dangerous. Because his understanding of what we are facing today is as sharp as a dagger’s edge.’
The award was accepted on behalf of Alaa Abd el-Fattah by Lina Attalah who said: ‘For those of us who are engaged in a quest of truth finding, through writing or journalism or other avenues, Alaa’s courage lies somewhere there. It’s, as orated by Bertolt Brecht in an anti-fascist gathering, the courage of recognizing the truth when it is hidden, the skill to turn it into something we can fight with, the cunning of finding in whose hands to put it and spread it. In his writing; newspaper articles, social media posts, and prison letters, Alaa was finding the truth in and through language; and he has always been doing it not as a self-serving act of contemplation, but as an invitation to learn, think along and move on with it. In prison, his writing became a fugitive body on incarceration as the ultimate underside of state management. Such were the politics of his writings that are worthy of this recognition.’
Arundhati Roy further announced that her share of the prize money will be donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.
Watch the full ceremony below
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