PEN/Pinter Prize

[Iain Fisher]

Poet, translator and playwright Tony Harrison is the first winner of the PEN/Pinter prize and will receive the award on 14 Oct 2009.

Tony Harrison is best known for the long poem V, very much a poem for performance.

He has regularly written new plays for The National Theatre in London including The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus (his translation and completion of a fragment of a Sophocles play) and Square Rounds, both of which were hugely popular.  He managed to combine intellectualism with popular appeal.

His last piece, Fram, was spectacularly badly received, emptying the theatre during the interval.  It was a very poor piece, unable to decide what it was about and unable to focus, resulting in long sequences of poorly related scenes.  Hopefully he will soon be back to form.

The Guardian newspaper commissioned Harrison to go to Bosnia and his poetry from these probably contributed most to him winning the prize.

[Iain Fisher]

The PEN/Pinter Prize has been set up.  The prize will be awarded to British or UK-based writers whose work fulfils the vision for writing that Harold Pinter set out in the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, an "unflinching, unswerving" gaze upon the world, and showing a "fierce intellectual determination ... to define the real truth of our lives and our societies".

The PEN/Pinter prize, worth £1000, will be presented at the British Library on 14 Oct 2009.  The judges of the prize include Winter's widow Lady Antonia Fraser, playwright Tom Stoppard, broadcaster Mark Lawson, National Theatre artistic director Nicholas Hytner and president of PEN Lisa Appignanesi.