The wound that is Palestine: Arundhati Roy

October 21, 2024

ISLAMABAD – I thank you, members of English PEN and members of the jury, for honouring me with the PEN Pinter Prize. I would like to begin by announcing the name of this year’s ‘Writer of Courage’, who I have chosen to share this award with.

My greetings to you, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, writer of courage and my fellow awardee. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be freed yet. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison you wrote, “[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.” We are listening, Alaa. Closely.

Greetings to you, too, my beloved Naomi Klein, friend to both Alaa and me. Thank you for being here tonight. It means the world to me.

Greetings to all of you gathered here, as well as to those who are invisible perhaps to this wonderful audience, but as visible to me as anybody else in this room. I am speaking of my friends and comrades in prison in India — lawyers, academics, students, journalists — Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut. I speak to you, my friend Khurram Parvaiz, one of the most remarkable people I know, you’ve been in prison for three years, and to you too Irfan Mehraj, and to the thousands incarcerated in Kashmir and across the country whose lives have been devastated.

When Ruth Borthwick, the chair of English PEN and of the Pinter panel, first wrote to me about this honour, she said the Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define “the real truth of our