Award-winning author Arundhati Roy strongly criticised the US and Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza and Lebanon in her acceptance speech for the PEN Pinter Prize at a ceremony in London earlier this month.
Long a critic of Israel’s occupation, Roy said she “refused to play the condemnation game” by creating “moral equivalence" between Israel and Hamas, citing the double standards often applied to Palestinians and calling on the US to end its support for Israel.
Roy also paid homage to arbitrarily imprisoned Egyptian writer Alaa Abdel Fattah, with whom she shared her award and whom she named PEN’s 2024 Writer of Courage, calling for his release from detention by the Egyptian authorities.