The poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has been awarded the PEN Pinter prize for her ability to be “independent and sometimes awkward, to make important points through her work”. The prize was set up by PEN to commemorate playwright Harold Pinter. Duffy was praised for, among other things, her quick poetic reaction – a new poem – to being banned by an exam board for a poem about knife crime, and for a poem reflecting on the trial on the killers of Stephen Lawrence. Previous winners have been playwright David Hare, novelist Hanif Kureishi, and poet Tony Harrison.  She was awarded the honour by a judging panel of Hare, Margaret Drabble, Melvyn Bragg, Antonia Fraser and the president of English PEN, Gillian Slovo.

The prize is awarded annually to a British writer or a writer resident in Britain who, in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech, casts an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world, and shows a “fierce intellectual determination …to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”. Duffy's prize will be shared with an international writer of courage selected by her in association with English PEN’s Writers at Risk committee. English PEN is the founding centre of PEN International, the worldwide fellowship of writers promoting free expression and the literature across frontiers. 

Pinter’s widow, Antonia Fraser, said: "Carol Ann Duffy is a great poet: in addition we were all struck by [her] propensity for being independent and sometimes awkward, to make important points through her work. She comments on contemporary events directly in a way we do not believe a poet laureate has done before.”

Duffy will receive her prize on 8 October at an event at the British Library, where she will read several new poems as well as announce the name of the persecuted writer she has chosen to share the prize with. "I am hugely honoured and moved to receive an award which commemorates one of the greatest English writers of the 20th century," she said.