Michael Rosen was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2023

Michael Rosen has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2023 - the annual award for freedom of expression in literature. 

The Prize judges praised Rosen’s work, saying he ‘has a rare, invaluable gift: the ability to address the most serious matters of life in a spirit of joy, humour, and hope. Fearless in holding power to account.’ 

The PEN Pinter Prize was established in 2009 by the charity English PEN, which defends freedom of expression and celebrates literature, in memory of Nobel-Laureate playwright Harold Pinter. The prize is awarded annually to a writer of outstanding literary merit resident in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland or the Commonwealth 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’. 

Former winners of the PEN Pinter Prize include Malorie Blackman, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie,  Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi.