Adichie awarded PEN Pinter Prize

Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been awarded the 2018 PEN Pinter Prize for her outspokenness.  This year’s judges, who named Adichie the winner of the prize, were President of English PEN Philippe Sands, historian, biographer and widow of Harold Pinter Antonia Fraser, writer and critic Alex Clark, poet, playwright and performer Inua Ellams, and […]

Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been awarded the 2018 PEN Pinter Prize for her outspokenness. 

This year’s judges, who named Adichie the winner of the prize, were President of English PEN Philippe Sands, historian, biographer and widow of Harold Pinter Antonia Fraser, writer and critic Alex Clark, poet, playwright and performer Inua Ellams, and chair of Judges and chair of trustees for English PEN Maureen Freely. 

Adichie was praised by the judges for being “sophisticated beyond measure in her understanding of gender, race and global inequality.”

Freely said of Adichie: “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.”

Byatt, director of English PEN, described Adichie as “a very worthy winner of this extraordinary prize.”

Commenting, Adichie 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 first novel, ‘Purple Hibiscus’, was published in 2003. Her second novel, ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’, followed in 2006, winning the Orange Prize and Baileys’ ‘Best of the Best’ accolade in 2015. Her 2013 novel Americanah also won the US National Book Critics Circle Award. Her nonfiction includes ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ (2014) and ‘Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions’ (2017). 

The annual prize is given annually to a writer from Britain, the Republic of Ireland or the Commonwealth who, in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel 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.”