Arundhati Roy shares PEN Pinter Prize 2024 with Alaa Abd El-Fattah

British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah has been named "Writer of Courage" by Arundhati Roy, PEN Pinter Prize 2024 winner.

The "Writer of Courage" is awarded to an author who is "active in defence of freedom of expression", often at risk to their own safety, and shares the PEN Pinter Prize with the winner. Abd El-Fattah remains imprisoned and arbitrarily detained in Egypt, despite having completed his five-year sentence.

Roy, the 2024 winner of the prize 2024, selected her co-winner in cooperation with English PEN, and the announcement was made at the British Library. The author also announced that her share of the prize money will be donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.

Author and journalist Naomi Klein delivered a speech for Roy and Abd El-Fattah, praising their work. Lina Attalah, editor-in-chief of the online newspaper Mada Masr, accepted the award on Abd El-Fattah’s behalf.

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."

Attalah added: "In his writing, his 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."

Klein, who delivered the encomium, said: "Alaa Abd El-Fattah embodies the relentless courage and intellectual depth that Arundhati Roy herself so powerfully represents, making her selection of him as the Writer of Courage profoundly fitting. Despite enduring a series of unjust sentences that robbed him of over a decade of freedom, his liberation continues to be denied. This prize, shared between two vital voices, reminds us of the urgent need to continue to raise our own in a call to ’Free Alaa’ at long last."