Leila Aboulela has won this year’s PEN Pinter prize for her writing on migration, faith and the lives of women.
The prize is awarded to a writer who, in the words of the late British playwright Harold Pinter, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world, and shows a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.
Aboulela grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and has lived in Aberdeen since 1990. Her six novels and two short story collections include The Translator, Elsewhere, Home and, most recently, 2023’s River Spirit.
“This comes as a complete and utter surprise,” said the writer on hearing the news. “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.”
Aboulela was announced winner at English PEN’s summer party on Wednesday evening, where actors Khalid Abdalla and Amira Ghazalla read from her work. 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”.
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, who judged this year’s prize alongside the poet and author Mona Arshi and the chair of English PEN, Ruth Borthwick. “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.”
Aboulela “offers us nuanced and rich perspectives on themes that are vital in our contemporary world: faith, migration, and displacement,” said Arshi.
“She is not the first to write about the experience of migration, but Leila is a writer for this moment, and my hope is that with this prize her gorgeous books find new readers, and open our minds to other possibilities,” added Borthwick.
Last year, Arundhati Roy won the prize, and selected the imprisoned British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah as Writer of Courage.
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The prize is awarded annually to writers resident in the UK, Ireland, the Commonwealth or the former Commonwealth. Previous winners include Michael Rosen, Malorie Blackman, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi.