The winner of the PEN Pinter Prize, the novelist Arundhati Roy, has named Alaa Abd el-Fattah, the British-Egyptian writer and activist, as PEN’s Writer of Courage 2024.
English PEN describes el-Fattah as one of the most prominent political prisoners in Egypt, someone who has spent most of the past decade behind bars. The organisation says: “He was most recently arrested in 2019 and was sentenced in December 2021 after spending two years in pre-trial detention. Despite completing his unjust five-year sentence on 29 September 2024, the Egyptian authorities have refused to release him, failing to account for the time he spent in pre-trial detention, in defiance of international legal norms and Egypt’s criminal law.”
In a speech at a reception in the British Library in London Roy said: “Why did I choose the jailed writer and blogger Alaa Abd el-Fattah as the Writer of Courage to share the PEN Pinter Prize with? For the same reason Egyptian authorities have chosen to keep him in prison for two more years instead of releasing him last month. Because his voice is as beautiful as it is dangerous. Because his understanding of what we are facing today is as sharp as a dagger’s edge.”
Lina Attalah, the co-founder and chief editor of the Egyptian independent online newspaper Mada Masr, accepted the Writer of Courage 2024 award on behalf of Alaa Abd el-Fattah. She said: “For those of us who are engaged in a quest of truth finding, through writing or journalism or other avenues, Alaa’s courage lies somewhere there. It’s as orated by Bertolt Brecht in an anti-fascist gathering, the courage of recognizing the truth when it is hidden, the skill to turn it into something we can fight with, the cunning of finding in whose hands to put it and spread it. In his writing; newspaper articles, social media posts, and prison letters, Alaa was finding the truth in and through language; and he has always been doing it not as a self-serving act of contemplation, but as an invitation to learn, think along and move on with it. In prison, his writing became a fugitive body on incarceration as the ultimate underside of state management. Such were the politics of his writings that are worthy of this recognition.’
The American writer Naomi Klein delivered an encomium, saying: “‘Alaa Abd el-Fattah embodies the relentless courage and intellectual depth that Arundhati Roy herself so powerfully represents, making her selection of him as the Writer of Courage profoundly fitting. Despite enduring a series of unjust sentences that robbed him of over a decade of freedom, his liberation continues to be denied. This prize, shared between two vital voices, reminds us of the urgent need to continue to raise our own in a call to ‘Free Alaa’ at long last.’
At the reception, Roy further announced that her share of the prize money will be donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.
