Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga has been awarded the PEN Pinter prize 2021, praised for her “ability to capture and communicate vital truths even amidst times of upheaval”.
- She was arrested last year in Harare while protesting against corruption.
- Dangarembga is the author of Nervous Conditions, which she wrote when she was 25, and which was described by Doris Lessing as one of the most important novels of the 20th century.
About PEN Pinter prize
- The PEN Pinter prize is given by free speech campaigners English PEN in memory of the Nobel laureate Harold Pinter.
- The award goes to a writer of “outstanding literary merit” who, as Pinter put it in his Nobel speech, shows a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.
- The PEN Pinter Prize was established in 2009 by the charity English PEN.
