Arundhati Roy wins PEN Pinter prize amid prosecution threat over Kashmir comments
New Delhi: 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.
According to Kashmir Media Service, 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.
In the days since, more than 200 Indian academics, activists and journalists have signed an open letter calling on the government to withdraw the decision.
Roy has been a vocal critic of Narendra Modi’s government. Salil Tripathi, a board member of PEN International, wrote in the Guardian last week that though Modi lost his parliamentary majority in the recent elections, it is “wrong to assume [he] has changed”.
