Leila Aboulela won the 2025 PEN Pinter Prize, which is awarded annually to a writer residing in the U.K., the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth, or the former Commonwealth who, in the words of Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize in Literature speech, 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."
Aboulela will be honored October 10 during a ceremony at the British Library, where she will deliver an address. The prize is shared with a Writer of Courage, "who is active in defense of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty." The co-winner, selected by Aboulela from a shortlist of international cases supported by English PEN, will be announced at the ceremony.
Judge and chair of English PEN Ruth Borthwick said: "Leila Aboulela's writing is extraordinary in its range and sensibility. From jewel-like short stories to tender novels, she tells us rarely heard stories that make us think anew about who lives in our neighborhoods and communities, and how they navigate their lives. 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."
Prize judge Mona Arshi commented: "I am so delighted that Leila Aboulela is the recipient of the PEN Pinter Prize 2025. 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. She offers us nuanced and rich perspectives on themes that are vital in our contemporary world: faith, migration, and displacement."
Judge Nadifa Mohamed added: "Leila Aboulela is an important voice in literature, and in a career spanning more than three decades her work has had a unique place in examining the interior lives of migrants who chose to settle in Britain. 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. 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."
"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."