New Delhi: The English PEN annual party has named Sudanese-Scottish author Leila Aboulela as the winner of the 2025 PEN Pinter Prize on Wednesday. The writer has cast an” unflinching, unswerving gaze upon the world” in the spirit of Harold Pinter, after whom the award was named.
Thus, Aboulela joined the likes of Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (2018), Arundhati Roy (2024), and Salman Rushdie (2014).
Judges this year, Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN; poet and author Mona Arshi; and novelist Nadifa Mohamed praised the force of Aboulela’s storytelling.
Borthwick said that Aboulela tells rarely heard stories that make readers think anew about who lives in their neighbourhood and communities.
Arshi opined that Aboulela brings silenced lives to the forefront and noted the writer’s subtlety and courage. Mohamed appreciated Aboulela for examining he interio lives of migrants and writing with a commitment to make the lives and decisions of Muslim women central to her fiction.
All the judges noted how Aboulela’s work in literature that spans novels, short stories, radio plays, etc., provides “a balm, a shelter and an inspiration” amid global conflicts such as those in Sudan, Gaza, etc.
Aboulela called the award an honour and said that it brings expansion and depth to the meaning of freedom of expression and the stories that get heard, TIE reports.
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,” TIE quoted her.
She will formally receive the prize at a ceremony on October 10 at the British Library, where she will also announce the Writer of Courage. Write of Courage is an individual persecuted for their work defending free expression.
Leila Aboulela was born in Cairo and raised in Khartoum. She later moved to Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1990, and she focused her work on themes of migration, faith, memory and the interior lives of Muslim women. Her novels, including The Translator (1999), Minaret (2005), and most recently, River Spirit (2023), were translated into 15 languages and are included in university curricula.
She is an Honorary Professor at the University of Aberdeen and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature