Hanif Kureishi scoops PEN Pinter prize

A panel of judges including Harold Pinter's widow, Lady Antonia Fraser, Lisa Appignanesi and Mariella Frostrup chose Hanif Kureishi as winner of this year’s PEN Pinter prize. The award, which goes to a writer who – in the words of Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize speech – casts an "unflinching, unswerving" gaze upon the world, was established last year by English PEN in memory of the Novel-winning dramatist, its former vice-president. The prize aims to honour a writer of "outstanding literary merit" who exemplifies Pinter's own "fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies". Fraser said her husband "would have been proud" of the selection of Kureishi, author of the Whitbread award-winning novel The Buddha of Suburbia and the Oscar-nominated screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette. Last year, poet and playwright Tony Harrison won the inaugural PEN Pinter prize, worth £1,000. More info…