The PEN Pinter Prize 2025: Leila Aboulela

This year’s PEN Pinter Prize is awarded to novelist, playwright, and short story writer Leila Aboulela who receives her award and delivers a lecture at this special event.

The Prize, established by the literature and human rights organisation English PEN, is given annually in memory of Nobel Laureate playwright Harold Pinter to a writer of outstanding literary merit, who, in Pinter’s words, casts an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world and shows a ‘fierce intellectual determination ... to define the real truth of our lives and our societies’. The Prize will be shared with the 2025 PEN Pinter Writer of Courage: a writer who is active in defence of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty.

The co-winner, selected by Leila Aboulela, will be announced at the event.  Leila Aboulela was chosen as the 2025 PEN Pinter Prize winner by this year’s judges: Chair of English PEN, Ruth Borthwick; poet and author Mona Arshi; and novelist Nadifa Mohamed. The PEN Pinter Prize is supported by the generosity of Faber and Ruth Maxted.