Last night at the British Library, the 2016 PEN Pinter Prize recipient Margaret Atwood chose Bangladeshi publisher, writer and activist Tutul as this year’s International Writer of Courage Award winner. Here, his acceptance speech for the Award, highlighting the ongoing campaign of violence against Bangladesh’s writers and his hope for the future.
Read this week’s PEN Atlas in the original Bangla here.
Margaret Atwood won the 2016 PEN Pinter Prize, awarded annually to a writer of outstanding literary merit 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’.
Listen to audio from ‘Words Cannot Be Killed’, a PEN Atlas event marking the anniversary of the death of secular blogger Avijit Roy exploring freedom of expression in Bangladesh.
Read more about and take action for the slain Bangladeshi bloggers mentioned in this PEN Atlas, Avijit Roy, Ananta Bijoy Das and Niloy Neel.