Ella Creamer
LEILA Aboulela has won this year’s PEN Pinter prize for her writing on migration, faith and the lives of women.
The prize is awarded to a writer who, in the words of the late British playwright Harold Pinter, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world, and shows a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.
Aboulela grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and has lived in Aberdeen since 1990. Her six novels and two short story collections include The Translator, Elsewhere, Home and, most recently, 2023’s River Spirit.
“This comes as a complete and utter surprise,” said the writer on hearing the news. “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.”
Aboulela was announced winner at English PEN’s summer party on Wednesday evening, where actors Khalid Abdalla and Amira Ghazalla read from her work. She will receive the award on 10 October at the British Library in London, where she will announce her choice of winner for the PEN Pinter Writer of Courage award, given to an author “active in defence of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty”.
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,” said novelist Nadifa Mohamed, who judged this year’s prize alongside the poet and author Mona Arshi and the chair of English PEN, Ruth Borthwick. “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.”
Aboulela “offers us nuanced and rich perspectives on themes that are vital in our contemporary world: faith, migration, and displacement,” said Arshi.
“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,” added Borthwick.
Last year, Arundhati Roy won the prize, and selected the imprisoned British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah as Writer of Courage.
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The prize is awarded annually to writers resident in the UK, Ireland, the Commonwealth or the former Commonwealth. Previous winners include Michael Rosen, Malorie Blackman, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi.
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Leila Aboulela, the Sudanese author who now lives in Scotland has won the English PEN Award 2025, a prize established in homage to Harold Pinter, the British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor and the 2005 Nobel Laureate for Literature:
“who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”
Judges praised Aboulela, the author of six novels, 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’.
The author responded:
‘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.’
One of the judges, novelist 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.’
Three Novels By Leila Aboulela I Recommend
Bird Summons (2019)
Bird Summons is an excellent novel about three Muslim immigrant women living in Scotland, from different countries, who set off on a short holiday in the Scottish Highlands, to pay homage to Lady Evelyn Murray Cobbold, the first British woman convert to Islam who performed Hajj, the spiritual pilgrimage to Mecca.
Taken further outside of their comfort zones, the trip is a kind of reckoning for each of the women, a little like a road trip novel, they are stuck with each other, their forced isolation in the Highlands brings out the best and worst in each other and will leave them each transformed by the experience.
The Kindness of Enemies (2015)
The Kindness of Enemies, is a dual narrative set in modern day Scotland and mid 1800’s Russia and the Caucasus. The contemporary character is Natasha Wilson (born to a Russian mother and Sudanese father, whose mother marries a Scot), a Scottish university lecturer whose research concerns the life of Caucasian Highlander, Shamil Imam.
The novel moves between the issues facing Natasha in her life, and the ancient conflict between Highlander mountain men lead by Shamil Imam as they resisted Tsarist Russia from expanding into their territory.
River Spirit (2023)