David Hare wins PEN/Pinter Prize 2011

Playwright wins prize for political writing.

David Hare has been awarded the PEN/Pinter prize for 2011. The prize was established by English PEN, which supports writers working under censorship and the threat of persecution, to draw attention to writers “of outstanding literary merit 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'”. Previous winners include Hanif Kureshi and Tony Harrison. Half of the prize will be shared with a “writer of courage” who has undergone political persecution for speaking publicly about their ideas; last year this half of the prize went to the Mexican journalist and human rights activist Lydia Cacho.

Once one of the enfant terribles of British theatre, penning a series of incendiary political plays for the Royal Court and National Theatre during the 1970s and 80s, Hare has ended up becoming a pillar of the theatrical establishment. He was given a knighthood in 1998 and his Page Eight, about an MI5 operative (Bill Nighy) chased out of his job for disclosing British complicity in torture, has become the latest in a series of works he has written for the BBC. Hare was one of the group, alongside Alan Clarke, editing Play for Today during its late 70s heyday. In a recent interview with Radio Times he said that he was glad to able to work on film and TV again, with its potentially huge audience. But it would be a mistake to think he has cooled in his politics. During the 2000s he worked on a series of “verbatim plays”, using transcripts of material to examine privatisation, the lead-up to the Iraq war and the origins of the financial crisis. “13 years have gone”, he has said, “and whether the plays are any good or not, they are certainly no less radical.” Lady Antonia Fraser, Harold Pinter’s widow and one of the prize judges, said:

In the course of his long, distinguished career, David Hare has never failed to speak out fearlessly on the subject of politics in the broadest sense; this courage, combined with his rich creative talent, makes him a worthy winner of the PEN/Pinter Prize.