PEN Pinter Prize 2026: Jacqueline Rose

The annual prize in memory of Nobel-Laureate playwright Harold Pinter.

This year’s PEN Pinter Prize is awarded to writer and critic Jacqueline Rose, who receives her award and delivers a lecture at this special event.

The Prize is given annually in memory of Nobel Laureate playwright Harold Pinter to a writer of outstanding literary merit, who, in Pinter’s words, 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’.

The Prize will be shared with the 2026 PEN Pinter Writer of Courage, a writer who is active in defence of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty. The co-winner, selected by Jacqueline Rose, will be announced at the event.

Jacqueline Rose was chosen as the 2026 PEN Pinter Prize winner by this year’s judges: Chair of English PEN, Ruth Borthwick; author and poet Will Harris; and playwright and screenwriter Tanika Gupta.

The PEN Pinter Prize is supported by the generosity of Faber and Ruth Allison.

She is co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, co-founder of Independent Jewish Voices UK, a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. Her books include The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, States of Fantasy, The Question of Zion, Women in Dark Times, Mothers: an essay on love and cruelty, On Violence and On Violence Against Women, and The Plague: Living Death in Our Times. Two Women, a novel based on the Jewish philosophers Edith Stein and Gillian Rose, will be published later this year.