Arundhati Roy wins PEN Pinter prize amid prosecution threat over Kashmir comments
Indian author Arundhati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter prize two weeks after Indian authorities granted permission to prosecute the writer over comments she made about Kashmir 14 years ago.
The prize is awarded annually to a writer who, in the words of the late 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”.
Judges praised Roy, who won the Booker prize in 1997 for The God of Small Things, for her “incisive commentary on issues ranging from environmental degradation to human rights abuses”.
On 14 June, Delhi’s most senior official sanctioned the prosecution of the writer under India’s stringent anti-terror laws because of a comment she made at an event in 2010 that the disputed region of Kashmir had never been an “integral” part of India.
