- Judges praised Aboulela for her ‘nuanced and rich perspectives on themes that are vital in our contemporary world: faith, migration, and displacement’, calling her writing ‘a balm, a shelter, and an inspiration’.
Today, Wednesday 9 July 2025, English PEN announced that writer Leila Aboulela has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2025. The announcement was made this evening at the English PEN Summer Party, held at the October Gallery, London, when actors Khalid Abdalla and Amira Ghazalla read from Aboulela’s work.
Leila Aboulela will receive the award at a ceremony at the British Library on 10 October 2025, where she will deliver an address.
Leila Aboulela said: ‘This comes as a complete and utter surprise. 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.’
The Prize will be shared with a Writer of Courage: a writer who is active in defence of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty. The co-winner, selected by Leila Aboulela, will be announced at the ceremony.
Leila Aboulela was chosen as the PEN Pinter Prize winner in June 2025 by this year’s judges: Chair of English PEN, Ruth Borthwick; poet and author Mona Arshi; and novelist Nadifa Mohamed.
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 neighbourhoods 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.’
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.’
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.’
Former winners of the PEN Pinter Prize are Arundhati Roy (2024), Michael Rosen (2023), Malorie Blackman (2022), Tsitsi Dangarembga (2021), Linton Kwesi Johnson (2020), Lemn Sissay (2019), Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (2018), Michael Longley (2017), Margaret Atwood (2016), James Fenton (2015), Salman Rushdie (2014), Tom Stoppard (2013), Carol Ann Duffy (2012), David Hare (2011), Hanif Kureishi (2010) and Tony Harrison (2009).
Former winners of the PEN Pinter Prize Writer of Courage are Alaa Abd el-Fattah (2024), Rahile Dawut (2023), Kakwenza Rukirabashaija (2021), Amanuel Asrat (2020), Befeqadu Hailu (2019), Waleed Abulkhair (2018), Mahvash Sabet (2017), Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury a.k.a.Tutul (2016), Raif Badawi (2015), Mazen Darwish (2014), Iryna Khalip (2013), Samar Yazbek (2012), Roberto Saviano (2011), Lydia Cacho (2010) and Zarganar (Maung Thura) (2009).
Leila Aboulela grew up in Khartoum and has been living in Aberdeen since 1990. She is the author of six novels among them River Spirit, The Translator, Minaret and Lyrics Alley, Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Leila was the first ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing and her story collection, Elsewhere, Home won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages, and she has also written numerous plays for BBC Radio. She is Honorary Professor of the WORD Centre at the University of Aberdeen and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.