Roberto Saviano : PEN-Pinter award for Courage 2011

The PEN/Pinter Prize was established in 2009 in memory of the Nobel-winning playwright Harold Pinter. The Prize is awarded annually to a British writer or a writer resident in Britain of outstanding literary merit.
The prize is shared with an imprisoned writer of courage selected by English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee in association with the winner. This half of the prize is awarded to someone who has been persecuted for speaking out about their beliefs.

Britain’s 2011 PEN-Pinter International Writer of Courage Award won by Roberto Saviano. Roberto Saviano is an Italian writer living in hiding under round-the-clock police protection for exposing the Mafia. Roberto Saviano’s 2006 best-selling novel “Gomorrah” is a depiction of the Naples Mafia.

British playwright David Hare shares the 2011 Pinter prize, viewed that Saviano wrote Gomorrah at great risk to his own safety.

Roberto Saviano took on the Neopolitan mafia, first in the novel Gomorrah and then in the film made from it thus he did so at great risk to his own safety.

Month: Current Affairs - December, 2011