The Sudanese novelist Leila Aboulela has been awarded the 2025 PEN Pinter Prize. She was lauded for her “nuanced and rich perspectives on . . . faith, migration, and displacement,” in fiction “extraordinary in its range and sensibility.” Her work includes six novels — The Translator (1999), Minaret (2005), Lyrics Alley (2010), The Kindness of Enemies (2015), Bird Summons (2019), and River Spirit (2023) — and two short story collections, Coloured Lights (2001) and Elsewhere, Home (2018).
Organized by English PEN, the annual PEN Pinter Prize is given to a writer residing in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth or former Commonwealth, who, in the words of the late playwright and Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, 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 is shared with a “Writer of Courage,” another writer selected by the winner together with English PEN’s Writers at Risk Committee.
The announcement came on July 9, during English PEN’s annual summer party at the October Gallery in London. Actors Khalid Abdalla and Amira Ghazalla read excerpts from Aboulela’s work at the event. The award ceremony proper took place on October 10 at the British Library in London, where Aboulela delivered an address and declared her choice for co-winner: the recipient of the PEN International Writer of Courage, awarded to a writer “who is active in defence of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty.”
“This comes as a complete and utter surprise,” Aboulela said. “Thank you, English PEN and the judges, for considering my work worthy of this award. I am honoured to win a prize established in memory of Harold Pinter, a great writer who continues to inspire so much loyalty and consistent high regard. 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. It brings expansion and depth to the meaning of freedom of expression and whose stories get heard.”
Aboulela was Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards in 2011 and of the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award in 2018. Aboulela was also the first ever recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000. In 2023, following the breakout of civil war in Sudan, she appeared on the cover of Open Country Mag, for a longform profile by me contextualizing her most recent novel River Spirit and illustrious career.
This year’s judging panel comprised Chair of English PEN Ruth Borthwick, British author and poet Mona Arshi, and British Somali novelist Nadifa Mohamed.
“In novels, short stories and radio plays she has navigated the global and local, the political with the spiritual, and the nostalgia for a past home with the concurrent curiosity and desire for survival in a new one,” Mohamed said. “Aboulela’s work is marked by a commitment to make the lives and decisions of Muslim women central to her fiction, and to examine their struggles and pleasures with dignity. In a world seemingly on fire, and with immense suffering unmarked and little mourned in Sudan, Gaza, and beyond, her writing is a balm, a shelter, and an inspiration.”
Borthwick stated, “She is not the first to write about the experience of migration, but Leila is a writer for this moment, and my hope is that with this prize her gorgeous books find new readers, and open our minds to other possibilities.”
Mona Arshi added, “Over the past few decades she has made a significant contribution to literature and writes with subtlety and courage in the way she storifies the interior lives of women who are often ignored or silenced in our culture.”
Last year, Indian author Arundhati Roy won the PEN Pinter Prize and announced the British Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah as Writer of Courage. Other previous winners include Linton Kwesi Johnson (2020), Salman Rushdie (2014), Hanif Kureishi (2010), and two more Open Country Mag cover stars in Tsitsi Dangarembga (2021) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2018).
