Source : Times of India
Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been awarded the 2018 PEN Pinter Prize. Adichie was awarded the prestigious award for her “refusal to be deterred or detained by the categories of others”.
The PEN Pinter Prize annual award is given to a writer for showing a “fierce intellectual determination… to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”, according to Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech. Writers only from Britain, the Republic of Ireland or the Commonwealth are eligible for the award.
Biographer Antonia Fraser, Harold Pinter’s widow, hailed Adichie for emboding “those qualities of courage and outspokenness which Harold much admired”. Apart from Frazer, this year’s judges for the PEN Pinter Prize include Philippe Sands- President of English PEN, Alex Clark- writer and critic, Inua Ellams- poet, playwright and performer, and Maureen Freely- chair of Judges and chair of trustees for English PEN. Adichie was praised by the judges for being “sophisticated beyond measure in her understanding of gender, race and global inequality”.
“In this age of the privatised, marketised self, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the exception who defies the rule. In her gorgeous fictions, but just as much in her TED talks and essays, she refuses to be deterred or detained by the categories of others. Sophisticated beyond measure in her understanding of gender, race, and global inequality, she guides us through the revolving doors of identity politics, liberating us all,” said Maureen Freely.
Adichie is a winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Orange Prize, and the US National Book Critics Circle Award too. On being awarded the PEN Pinter Prize, she said, “I admired Harold Pinter‘s talent, his courage, his lucid dedication to telling his truth, and I am honoured to be given an award in his name.” Adichie will collect the accolade at a public ceremony at the British Library which will be held in October. At the award ceremony she will deliver an address and also announce her co-winner, the International Writer of Courage 2018, who will be selected from a shortlist of international cases supported by English PEN, according to a report by The Bookseller.
