Arundhati Roy, the internationally celebrated author and human rights activist, has once again proven herself to be a model culture worker. On receiving the PEN Foundation’s annually given Pinter Prize last week, Roy announced that she’d be donating her prize money to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.
Named for the late British playwright Harold Pinter, the PEN Pinter Prize and the Pinter International Writer of Courage awards have been distributed annually since 2009. The former award is given to a British writer or resident of “outstanding literary merit,” and the latter is given to a writer laboring under active persecution. Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, and Tom Stoppard.
As part of her Pinter-given privilege, Roy got to name Alaa Abd el-Fattah as this year’s ‘Writer of Courage.’ Chosen “because his voice is as beautiful as it is dangerous,“ the British-Egyptian writer, activist, and political prisoner is the author of You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, a powerful exploration of protest. El-Fattah is currently still incarcerated in Egypt. So Lina Attalah, an Egyptian journalist, accepted the award on his behalf.
In her own acceptance speech, Roy recalled some of Pinter’s words. On receiving the Nobel Prize in 2005, the playwright considered what it means to be “unflinching” in the context of a thoughtless empire. The word, he argued, might be misconstrued as a compliment.
Roy applied this idea to the unfolding genocide in Palestine, at which we all should flinch.
Here’s an excerpt of her speech.
Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists.
A whole population is being starved—their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media.
(Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire.’ A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator.
Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.
You can read the rest of her bold remarks here.
Congratulations and courage to Ms. Roy and Mr. El-Fattah.
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