(Alison Flood’s article appeared in the Guardian, 9/17.)
"Courageous and irreverent" novelist and playwright Hanif Kureishi has won this year's PEN Pinter prize, which goes to a writer who – in the words of Harold Pinter's Nobel speech – casts an "unflinching, unswerving" gaze upon the world.
Pinter's widow, Lady Antonia Fraser, and a panel of judges including Lisa Appignanesi and Mariella Frostrup chose Kureishi as winner of the award established last year by English PEN in memory of the Novel-winning dramatist, its former vice-president. The prize aims to honour a writer of "outstanding literary merit" who exemplifies Pinter's own "fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies".
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