Celebrated writer and novelist, Chimamanda Adichie, has been named winner of the 2018 PEN Pinter Prize for her writing and activism.
The award is named after Nobel Prize-winning British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor, Harold Pinter, who died on December 24, 2008.
Chimamanda’s feat was announced on the organisation’s website on Tuesday, with Antonia Byatt, director of English PEN saying her writing, “has travelled across many frontiers showing us what is important in the world.”
Reacting to the award 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.”
Writers including Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Tom Stoppard have won the award in time past.
Adichie will receive the award at a public ceremony at the British Library on the evening of Tuesday 9 October, where she will deliver an address.
The PEN Pinter Prize was established in 2009 by the charity English PEN, which defends freedom of expression and promotes literature, in memory of Nobel-Laureate playwright Harold Pinter.
Judges for the award praised Adichie’s “refusal to be deterred or detained by the categories of others”.
“In this age of the privatised, marketised self, Chimamanda Adichie is the exception who defies the rule,” said Maureen Freely, chair of trustees for English PEN. “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.”
The prize is awarded annually to a writer of outstanding literary merit from Britain, the Republic of Ireland or the Commonwealth.
Adichie’s work includes Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah and her most recent book is Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, which she said began as advice for a friend on how to raise her daughter as a feminist.
