66-year-old British poet and journalist, James Fenton, has been announced as the winner of this year’s PEN Pinter prize. His work has been praised by the jury for speaking “truth to power - forcefully, fearlessly, and beautifully.”
The award was set up in 2009 and is inspired by the late Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech in 2005, in which the playwright stated that it is “mandatory” to cast an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze upon the world.
Also a playwright, Fenton is known for his political sensibility and he urged that writers show a “fierce intellectual determination . . . to define the real truth of our lives and our societies.”
“If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man,” he declared.
Previous winners of the award have included Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard and Carol Ann Duffy.
The jury for this year’s prize included Pinter’s widow, Antonia Fraser, Susannah Clapp, Sam Leith, Hisham Matar and president of English PEN Maureen Freely. The prize has previously been awarded to Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard and Carol Ann Duffy.
Fenton’s anti-war poem, Blood and Lead opens as follows: “Listen to what they did / Don’t listen to what they said / What was written in blood / Has been set up in lead.”
