Leila Aboulela. Image: English PEN, Judy Laing
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Aboulela Gives Her Address on October 10
The author Leila Aboulela has been named the 2025 PEN Pinter Prize laureate, making her the latest winner of an honor attached to some of the most influential writers of recent decades including Margaret Atwood, Tom Stoppard, David Hare, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Salman Rushdie, and Arundhati Roy.
As you’ll recall, the PEN Pinter Prize, now in its 16th year, was created in 2009 by English PEN in memory of Pinter, a Nobel laureate and vice-president of English PEN, as well as an active participant in many of the organization’s campaigns. Not unlike the International Publishers Association (IPA) Prix Voltaire for publishers, the Pinter Prize honors humanitarian bravery and the zeal of activist writing among authors.
The award is given annually to a writer who lives in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth, or former Commonwealth venues. That writer must, in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech, cast an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze upon the world, and show a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies.”
“From jewel-like short stories to tender novels, she tells us rarely heard stories that make us think anew about who lives in our neighborhoods and communities, and how they navigate their lives.”Ruth Borthwick, English PEN
The prize is shared with a designated “Writer of Courage”—someone who has been persecuted for speaking out about her or his beliefs. This “Writer of Courage” is selected by the Writers at Risk committee in association with the Pinter Prize winner. This year’s co-winner will be announced at the October 10 ceremony at which Aboulela will give an address at the British Library.
In response to being named the Pinter Prize winner, Aboulela said, “This comes as a complete and utter surprise. Thank you, English PEN and the judges, for considering my work worthy of this award. I am honored to win a prize established in memory of Harold Pinter, a great writer who continues to inspire so much loyalty and consistent high regard.
“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.”
Ruth Borthwick
The prize this year was juried by Ruth Borthwick, the chair of English PEN; the author and poet Mona Arshi; and the novelist Nadifa Mohamed.
Borthwick, speaking about the selection of Aboulela, said, “Leila Aboulela’s writing is extraordinary in its range and sensibility. From jewel-like short stories to tender novels, she tells us rarely heard stories that make us think anew about who lives in our neighborhoods and communities, and how they navigate their lives.
“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.”
Saqi Books
Juror Arshi said, “Over the past few decades, Leila Aboulela has made a significant contribution to literature and writes with subtlety and courage in the way she storifies the interior lives of women who are often ignored or silenced in our culture. She offers us nuanced and rich perspectives on themes that are vital in our contemporary world: faith, migration, and displacement.”
And Juror Mohamed said, “Leila Aboulela is an important voice in literature, and in a career spanning more than three decades her work has had a unique place in examining the interior lives of migrants who chose to settle in Britain.
“In novels, short stories, and radio plays she has navigated the global and local, the political with the spiritual, and the nostalgia for a past home with the concurrent curiosity and desire for survival in a new one.
Grove Atlantic
“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. 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.”
Leila Aboulela, among others, is published in the United Kingdom by Saqi Books, and in the United States by Grove Atlantic’s Grove Press. Her work reportedly has been translated into 15 languages. She’s a resident of Aberdeen, and has written multiple plays for BBC Radio including The Insider, The Lion of Chechnya, the Mystic Life, and a dramatization of her novel The Translator. An honorary professor in the WORD Centre at the University of Aberdeen, she’s a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
In June 2024, Faber CEO Mary Cannam announced a three-year partnership supporting English PEN. Faber, among the United Kingdom’s premiere independent houses, published Pinter extensively, as you can see on the publishers’ page dedicated to his work.
Past winners of the PEN Pinter Prize
- Arundhati Roy (2024)
- Michael Rosen (2023)
- Malorie Blackman (2022)
- Tsitsi Dangarembga (2021)
- Linton Kwesi Johnson (2020)
- Lemn Sissay (2019)
- Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (2018)
- Michael Longley (2017)
- Margaret Atwood (2016)
- James Fenton (2015)
- Salman Rushdie (2014)
- Tom Stoppard (2013)
- Carol Ann Duffy (2012)
- David Hare (2011)
- Hanif Kureishi (2010)
- Tony Harrison (2009)
Former International Writers of Courage
- Alaa Abd el-Fattah (2024)
- Rahile Dawut (2023)
- Abduljalil Al-Singace (2022)
- Kakwenza Rukirabashaija (2021)
- Amanuel Asrat (2020)
- Befeqadu Hailu (2019)
- Waleed Abulkhair (2018)
- Mahvash Sabet (2017)
- Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury a.k.a.Tutul (2016)
- Raif Badawi (2015)
- Mazen Darwish (2014)
- Iryna Khalip (2013)
- Samar Yazbek (2012)
- Roberto Saviano (2011)
- Lydia Cacho (2010)
- Zarganar (Maung Thura) (2009)
More from Publishing Perspectives on children’s books and YA books is here, more on the work of Malorie Blackman is here, more on the PEN Pinter Prize is here, and more from us on publishing and book awards programs is here.
Publishing Perspectives is the International Publishers Association’s world media partner.