Born to an Egyptian mother and Sudanese father, Aboulela grew up in a Khartoum where British colonial echoes mingled with the call to prayer
Sudanese-British novelist Leila Aboulela has been named winner of the 2025 PEN Pinter Prize in recognition of body of work that “makes us think anew about who lives in our neighbourhoods,” judges said on Wednesday evening.
The award, announced at English PEN’s summer party in Bloomsbury’s October Gallery, is given annually to a writer who, in the spirit of Harold Pinter, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze upon the world. Previous laureates include Arundhati Roy and Michael Rosen.
Aboulela, 59, left Khartoum for Aberdeen in 1990 and has since published six novels and two story collections that dissect faith, migration and the interior lives of Muslim women. Her debut “The Translator” was selected as a New York Times Notable Book; her most recent novel, 2023’s “River Spirit”, revisits the 1898 British conquest of Sudan through the eyes of a teenage girl, a merchant and a jihadi leader.
Speaking moments after the announcement, Aboulela told reporters the accolade carried a special resonance. “For someone like me—a Muslim Sudanese immigrant who writes from a religious perspective and probes the limits of secular tolerance—this recognition feels truly significant. It expands the meaning of freedom of expression and, crucially, whose stories get heard.”
The author, who will formally receive the prize at the British Library on 10 October, also earns the right to select the annual “Writer of Courage”, an imprisoned or persecuted author who will share the evening’s platform.
The judging panel—poet Mona Arshi, novelist Nadifa Mohamed and English PEN chair Ruth Borthwick—described Aboulela’s prose as “a balm, a shelter and an inspiration”. Borthwick noted the “jewel-like precision” of her short fiction and the “tender moral intelligence” of her novels. “She tells rarely heard stories that make us reconsider the textures of contemporary Britain,” she said.
Arshi highlighted the writer’s “nuanced and rich perspectives on faith, migration and displacement—themes that are vital in our fractured world”, while Mohamed praised Aboulela for centring “the struggles and pleasures of Muslim women with unapologetic dignity”.
Born to an Egyptian mother and Sudanese father, Aboulela grew up in a Khartoum where British colonial echoes mingled with the call to prayer. She read economics at the University of Khartoum and later statistics at the London School of Economics, but found her voice, she says, only after moving to Scotland and becoming a stay-at-home mother. “I began to write because I was homesick,” she once told the Guardian. “Faith was the bridge between my old life and my new one.”
That bridge underpins her fiction. In “Minaret” (2005), a Sudanese exile working as a nanny in London rediscovers Islam after a life of privilege collapses. In “Lyrics Alley” (2010), shortlisted for the Orange Prize, she revisits Sudan on the eve of independence. Critics have praised her ability to render prayer as drama and to portray migration not merely as trauma but as spiritual possibility.
“River Spirit”, her most ambitious novel yet, shifts the lens to 19th-century Sudan. Told through multiple voices, the book charts the Mahdist uprising against Anglo-Egyptian rule and indicts the violence of empire without flattening its characters into victims or villains. The Times Literary Supplement called it “a masterclass in historical empathy”.
Aboulela is currently working on a children’s novel set between Aberdeen and Jeddah, and adapting “The Translator” for television. At October’s British Library ceremony she will deliver the annual Pinter lecture, titled “Listening to the Unheard”, and announce her chosen Writer of Courage.
The PEN Pinter Prize, established in 2009, commemorates Harold Pinter’s commitment to artistic freedom and human rights. English PEN director Maureen Freely said Wednesday’s choice reaffirmed the organisation’s belief that “writers who refuse to look away deserve our loudest applause”.
