Author Arundhati Roy is among the two winners of the 2024 ‘Disturbing the Peace’ Award by United States-based non-profit organisation Vaclav Havel Center.
Roy will share the award with Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi, who is known mainly for his songs protesting political repression by the Iranian government.
Jury member Salil Tripathi, announcing the award, said that Roy speaks for the marginalised and dispossessed people of India.
He said that the Booker Prize-winning author speaks for those “whose lands are taken away for big business; who oppose India’s nuclear policies; who speak up for the Dalits; and who fight for their self-determination, making the comfortable afflicted, and offering comfort to the afflicted”.
The Vaclav Havel Center gives the award every year to a “courageous dissenter” and seeks to spotlight global writers fighting for human rights. The award is given in the name of Vaclav Havel, an author and political dissident who went on to become the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic.
It includes a cash prize of $5,000, or Rs 4.19 lakh, and supports individuals who “embody Havel’s legacy while drawing attention to the many writers worldwide who bravely fight human rights violations.”
In June, Roy was named as the 2024 winner of the PEN Pinter Prize which was set up in 2009 by English PEN in memory of Nobel laureate playwright Harold Pinter. Roy will receive the prize on October 10 in a ceremony co-hosted by the British Library.
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