British-Egyptian writer, software developer and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah has been named this year’s PEN writer of courage. The 42-year-old is still in prison in Egypt, despite having completed his five-year sentence for allegedly “spreading false news”.
“Let’s remember that this is an innocent man who has committed no crime, but even so, he will have served his time on 29 September,” Abd el-Fattah’s sister, Sanaa Seif, said last month.
Every year, the winner of the PEN Pinter prize shares their award with a writer of courage, chosen from a shortlist of international writers who have actively defended freedom of expression put forward by human rights organisation English PEN. Arundhati Roy, as winner of the 2024 prize, selected Abd el-Fattah.
The Indian author said she wanted to share her prize with Abd el-Fattah “for the same reason that Egyptian authorities have chosen to keep him in prison for two more years instead of releasing him last month. Because his voice is as beautiful as it is dangerous. Because his understanding of what we are facing today is as sharp as a dagger’s edge.”
Abd el-Fattah, a figurehead of Egypt’s 2011 uprising that overthrew the former dictator Hosni Mubarak, is one of the most prominent political prisoners in Egypt, having spent the majority of the past decade in detention. He was most recently arrested in 2019 and was sentenced in December 2021. The Egyptian authorities refused to release him on 29 September, when his five-year sentence was up, as they did not count the two years he had spent in pre-trial detention, going against international legal norms and Egypt’s criminal law.
Foreign secretary David Lammy has previously championed Abd el-Fattah’s case, accusing the former Conservative government of letting down British citizens by failing to take action, though he has not addressed the case publicly since taking office.
At a ceremony at the British Library in London on Thursday evening, Lina Attalah, editor-in-chief of independent Egyptian online newspaper Mada Masr, accepted the award on Abd el-Fattah’s behalf. “In his writing, newspaper articles, social media posts and prison letters, Alaa was finding the truth in and through language,” she said. “He has always been doing it not as a self-serving act of contemplation, but as an invitation to learn, think along and move on with it.”
Author and Guardian US columnist Naomi Klein, who spoke at the ceremony, said, “Alaa Abd el-Fattah embodies the relentless courage and intellectual depth that Arundhati Roy herself so powerfully represents, making her selection of him as the writer of courage profoundly fitting.”
Roy also announced at the ceremony that her share of the prize money will be donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.
