About The PEN Pinter Prize 2025: Leila Aboulela
This year’s PEN Pinter Prize is awarded to novelist, playwright, and short story writer Leila Aboulela who receives her award and delivers a lecture at this special event.
The Prize, established by the literature and human rights organisation English PEN, 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 2025 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 Leila Aboulela, will be announced at the event.
Leila Aboulela was chosen as the 2025 PEN Pinter Prize winner by this year’s judges: Chair of English PEN, Ruth Borthwick; poet and author Mona Arshi; and novelist Nadifa Mohamed.
The PEN Pinter Prize is supported by the generosity of Faber and Ruth Maxted.
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About the speaker
Leila Aboulela grew up in Khartoum and has been living in Aberdeen since 1990. She is the author of six novels among them River Spirit, The Translator, Minaret and Lyrics Alley, Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Leila was the first ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing and her story collection, Elsewhere, Home won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages, and she has also written numerous plays for BBC Radio. She is Honorary Professor of the WORD center at the University of Aberdeen and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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.
About English PEN
English PEN is one of the world's oldest human rights organisations and the founding centre of PEN International, a worldwide writers’ association with 130 centres in more than 90 countries. The charity works to promote literature and to defend freedom of expression in the UK and internationally. www.englishpen.org
Attending your event
This is an in-person only event in the British Library Knowledge Centre. 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
Concessions
There are a range of concessions available. These include discounts for British Library Members, half-price tickets for students and under 26s, free entry for carers as well as a number of other concessions.
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