About PEN Pinter Prize 2026: Jacqueline Rose
This year’s PEN Pinter Prize is awarded to writer and critic Jacqueline Rose, who receives her award and delivers a lecture at this special event.
The Prize is given annually in memory of Nobel Laureate playwright Harold Pinter to a writer of outstanding literary merit, who, in Pinter’s words, 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’.
The Prize will be shared with the 2026 PEN Pinter 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 Jacqueline Rose, will be announced at the event.
Jacqueline Rose was chosen as the 2026 PEN Pinter Prize winner by this year’s judges: Chair of English PEN, Ruth Borthwick; author and poet Will Harris; and playwright and screenwriter Tanika Gupta.
The PEN Pinter Prize is supported by the generosity of Faber and Ruth Maxted.
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Jacqueline Rose
Jacqueline Rose is internationally recognised as one of the most important living feminist critics for her writing on literature, psychoanalysis, Israel/Palestine and South Africa.
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She is co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices UK, a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. Her books include The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, States of Fantasy, The Question of Zion, Women in Dark Times, Mothers: an essay on love and cruelty, On Violence and On Violence Against Women, and The Plague: Living Death in Our Times. Two Women, a novel based on the Jewish philosophers Edith Stein and Gillian Rose, will be published later this year.
About English PEN
English PEN is one of the world's oldest human rights organisations, championing the freedom to write and read.
It is the founding centre of PEN International, a worldwide writers’ association with 130 centres in more than 90 countries. With the support of our members – a community of readers, writers, and activists – we protect freedom of expression whenever it is under attack, support writers facing persecution around the world, and celebrate contemporary international writing with literary prizes, grants, events, and our online magazine PEN Transmissions.
Website: englishpen.org
Instagram: @EnglishPEN_
Bluesky: @englishpen.bsky.social
About the 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.
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’.
Harold Pinter (10 October 1930 – 24 December 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.
Venue and bar opening times
This event will take place in the British Library Knowledge Centre and is also available to watch online. Tickets may be booked to attend in person, or to watch online.
If you are attending in person, please note that the Knowledge Centre and the bar will be open from 18.00.
Please arrive no later than 15 minutes before the start time of this event. If you have specific access requirements please email customer@bl.uk
Attending the event online
If you book an online ticket, you will receive the viewing link on the morning of the event. You can either watch the event live or during the next 14 days on catch up.
Concessions
There are a range of concessions available. These include discounts for British Library Members, Young Persons (16 – 25s), and visitors on Universal/Pension Credit and free entry for carers.
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