 Welcome back to the British Library and welcome back to the PEN pincer prizes. Those of you who don't know me, my name is Jamie Andrews. I lead here at the British Library on our cultural and learning programming and whether you're here with us in the theatre here at the British Library in London or whether you're watching us online across the UK and beyond including of course our living knowledge network partners in public libraries across the country wherever you are it's great to have you with us. This is the 13th annual PEN pincer prizes and those of you who are regulars at the prizes will know that we have hosted them here at the British Library since their inception in 2009 when they were founded by our good friends and partners English PEN to honour the great writer and playwright Harold Pinter and really anything that honours the life, the legacy, the work of Harold Pinter is something that we want to be associated with. At the British Library we we have Harold's archive and indeed the archive of Lady Antonia Fraser as well and in that archive in that massive archive tens of thousands of documents are really all of Harold's creative works all of it available to anyone to everyone here at the reading rooms at the British Library and amongst those papers amongst that treasure trove of documents is something to be moving which are the hand written notes written on yellow legal pads some of you will remember and recognise that the hand written notes for Harold's Nobel speech and the text of that speech of course informs very much the spirit of this prize. This year and we'll hear more shortly is very special for our friends and partners at English PEN they are celebrating their 100th anniversary 100 years of championing writers and freedom of expression and we're delighted that English PEN that the Pen Pinter awards are part of the events that mark that important milestone for English PEN really here at the British Library we are huge fans and admirers of everything that English PEN do so for me just to say thanks to everyone who's been involved with the awards thanks to everyone at the British Library and our partners congratulations of course to the two writers that we'll be honouring in just a little while this evening but for now to say more about English PEN's work and to introduce this year's prize gives me great pleasure to hand over to the president of English PEN Philippe Sands. Thank you so much Jamie and to you and all the staff at the British Library it's incredibly nice I think for everyone to be back in person in these difficult times I'm really honoured to welcome you on behalf of English PEN and Lady Antonio Frazier to the 13th Pen Pinter Prize award ceremony in memory and to honour Harold Pinter to celebrate writing that fulfills his vision in a set out in his Nobel Prize speech of our obligation as citizens and writers to define the real truth of our lives through unflinching unswerving fierce intellectual determination and I have to say in modern Britain that is particularly important right now. We're delighted to be holding the ceremony once again here at the British Library in this wonderful space which as Jamie mentioned holds the archive of Harold Pinter's work. Our thanks at English PEN go to Claire Armidstead, Andrew McMillan and Ella Wachatama who acted as judges in this year's competition and they have exercised extraordinary and wonderful judgment in selecting Tsitsi Dangaremga as the winner of this year's Pen Pinter Prize. The judges collectively said of her work, Tsitsi Dangaremga's work through her books, activism and films demonstrates diligence, stoicism and the ability to capture and communicate vital truths even amidst times of upheaval. Hers is a voice we all need to hear and to heed. The prize would not be possible without incredibly generous support of its funders. Can I thank on behalf of English PEN in particular the Blavatnik Family Foundation and Ruth Maxsted. Special thanks as always to the cartoonist Martin Rosen who traditionally draws a cartoon on a cricketing theme. Cricket is very important I think also in Zimbabwe. In homage to Harold Pinter and that will be presented to you in due course. Our thanks also to Panash Chugomadsy for their new commission in tribute to Tsitsi Dangaremga which will be premiered this evening. Thanks also to Dottie Irving, Trudys Sprite and Holly Hooley of fabulous four communications who have provided so much support as always to English PEN in helping us to publicise this award. The PEN Pinter Prize asks the winner in association with English PEN's Writers at Risk programme to choose one fellow international writer to share the prize and later this evening we're delighted that Tsitsi Dangaremga will announce the winner of that aspect of the prize and so now it's my very great pleasure to introduce in order to introduce Tsitsi Dangaremga the award-winning novelist Sarah Collins. Sarah. Thank you Philippe and good evening. It's a huge honour for me to lead this chorus of celebration for Tsitsi Dangaremga, a writer and filmmaker I consider to be one of the world's most powerful storytellers. To understand just how powerful I recommend going back in time and rearranging your biography to grow up black and a girl descended from a long line of women erased by colonisation thereby rendering you invisible. Such a childhood contrary to popular belief confers a multitude of gifts including the capacity to be struck by a particular kind of magic when a book like Tsitsi's Nervous Conditions comes along, something hard to describe but akin to being called into existence. If you've never felt that magic well as my Jamaican grandmother would have said, dog nyam y supper, which for the non-Jamaicans in the room means the dog has eaten your supper. In other words you're missing something special. Tsitsi gave us that magic. Her literary output has changed the world, not exclusively for young black women perhaps but especially for us. Nervous Conditions was a book we loved that actually loved us back, that carved space in the world for us, the descendants of the invisible. She followed it with two sequels, The Book of Knot in 2008 and This Mornable Body which was shortlisted for the booker last year. Together they traced the post-colonial nervous condition by following the fortunes of Tambudzai from school girl in 1960s southern Rhodesia swallowing down a colonial education to disillusioned middle age in 1990s Zimbabwe. Each novel on its own is a small miracle achieving a masterful equilibrium even while probing Tambudzai's damaged psyche. When they are set side by side the trilogy is a singular achievement. Tsitsi is a truth teller. She has said that she writes about human beings and you see the politics through the lens of the person. She has fulfilled with exquisite precision the writer's duty to the work, applying her formidable intellect to interrogating the idea that while the first liberation struggle might be against the colonizer, the second inevitably is against ourselves. Her novels haven't just defined reality but have become essential tools for changing it. What courage it must have taken to produce work like that in the conditions she faced, the lone voice at a time when no woman were published in her country, when she was offered neither opportunities nor support. And Tsitsi's courage is as a parent in the way she conducts herself in the world as it is in her body of work. In life as on the page she is clear, truthful, resolute. Her activism is an example of what happens when a writer's rigorous attention translates to brave exemplary citizenship, when her exceptional talent is equal to her deep morality. There are videos online of the moment Tsitsi was arrested last year in Harare while protesting with a friend. In them the two women walked companionably along the road. Tsitsi carrying a placard containing these six words, we want better, reform our institutions. They're stopped by officers and directed into the back of a truck overloaded with other officers outnumbering them at least 20 to one, many carrying guns. It is a dystopian image, guns, men and truck on the one hand, two women armed only with placards on the other, yet it is also a tableau in which the sources of power and of fear are not as obvious as they might appear. One that perhaps reminds us that books and all forms of writing as Wole Soynka observed have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress the truth. Moments before her arrest Tsitsi spoke into the camera, I am not a human rights defender by profession, she said, I am a filmmaker and artist. It is a line she draws whenever she is asked about her activism, this boundary between writer and citizen. It is true that there was no more of an imperative for a writer to be at the roadside that day than a bus driver or a dentist, that these obligations of good citizenship are personal except that a writer is professionally obliged to pay close attention to the world while a dentist's only duty is to pay close attention to your teeth. In writing about human beings, Tsitsi reveals the state of a nation and what is a writer to do when she has examined the state of her nation and found it wanting. Sometime last year Tsitsi tweeted the following, friends, hair is a principle. If you want your suffering to end, you have to act. In closing let me confess that to settle my nerves tonight I stole a trick from my barrister father who would often prepare to address a jury by listening to Bob Marley before court. I settled on Marley's 1980 encomium for the newly independent Zimbabwe. No more internal power struggle Bob sings on that track. We come together to overcome the little trouble and soon we will find out who is the real revolutionary. There was so much hope in Zimbabwe 30 years ago when Marley performed that song. When that hope fractured, Tsitsi began the work she has been doing for decades, steadfastly, bravely, excellently. Casting her on flinching gaze upon the world and showing a fierce intellectual determination to define the real truths of our lives, to quote the words of Harold Pinter that established the criteria for this prize. It is impossible to imagine the landscape of post-colonial literature without her novels. It is equally impossible to imagine the future of Zimbabwe without her citizenship. Not only Tsitsi are you a storyteller of outstanding power, you are a real revolutionary. I'd now like to introduce Lady Antonia Fraser who will present Tsitsi Dangarembwa with the 2021 Pen Pinter Prize after which Tsitsi will read from her work and deliver her address. Thank you. Where is she? Tsitsi, on behalf of Harold Pinter, I'm honoured to give you this prize and his name. I can also say in a more human way he would have been so pleased and he would have loved to have met you, so I'm going to give you something he would have loved to have given you. This is Harold's passionate love of cricket and I hope to enjoy it, Tsitsi. It's wonderful. It's absolutely lovely. Thank you. Good evening everybody. Thank you all for being here. Thank you Sarah for the wonderful words. Of course I can't recognise myself and so now I'm in a kind of dystopian space because I'm thinking who am I. Am I really that person but thank you so much. I'll try to live up to that. I'm really grateful that everybody is here this evening celebrating with me an occasion I think of not so much as my having won the Pen Printer Prize 2021 but as a rather splendid present that found its way to me. My career has taught me that the world of a writer is doing and that when circumstances allow this doing is in fact writing. On the other hand when circumstances do not allow for the writing process a writer continues the expression that is no longer possible in literature or that has become inadequate through literary means with other actions. I have come to see that the work of writing is not to be seen to be doing but in fact to do and to keep on doing regardless of circumstances. Only sometimes if a writer is very fortunate is that doing seen. On that note I would like to congratulate all past winners of the prize whose company I now join. I do not exaggerate that when I went through the list of past prize winners I was stunned to be included with such literary gravitas. I'm glad that my being stunned has not caused my manners to depart from me and so I say a heartfelt thank you to English Pen for this recognition. I also thank the jury who appreciated and recognized value in my voice. A voice from that part of the world so often described as other and so often preceded by negative qualifiers. There are seven billion human beings on the planet. I am now one of the few who understand what a great privilege it is to find oneself in a place that not even imagination had been capable of transporting one to. For most of us in this era of modernity staying alive day after day and accessing that which is necessary to sustain life is not a given. It is a struggle of Darwinian proportions that one engages in day upon day and from moment to moment. The COVID-19 pandemic which emphasised the tenuousness of our hold on life globalised our knowledge of the struggle to remain one who breathes. As a result of the pandemic some who had not wanted for anything before gasped for breath they could no longer catch. This was in glaring contrast to their pre-pandemic era experience when gasping and grasping and not finding was restricted to those in my part of the world. People who are labelled variously as undeveloped third world economically developing, emerging and so on. These labels prevent us often from asking what is happening to the human beings in those lands. Human beings who emerge at birth as fully developed as any human being in any part of the world. As science and medicine forge ahead to contain the pandemic the knowledge of the extraordinary grace of every breath each of us breathes will reseed for some but for others the astonishment at surviving each day as a functioning coherent human being will remain. For these fellow human beings on this planet physical existence is threatened daily. My physical existence like that of many in this room has not often been threatened. Only once was my physical freedom compromised when I was arrested for demonstrating in July of last year. This compromise of my physical freedom lasted for only one night. The short length of my detention might be interpreted by some as indicating a functional level of justice and freedom in my country Zimbabwe. However in my opinion I live and work under circumstances that make my standing here and the fact that an award of the nature of the pen pinter prize was created at all. An immense achievement by all the elements and systems that culminate in the awarding of this prize each year. Tonight's occasion is not my first engagement with English Pen. On 5th August 2020 following my arrest and detention overnight English Pen called for charges against me to be dropped. The statement was worded in an absolutely brilliant way. It's read in a bizarre turn of events that could be part of a surreal novel. Citi Dandaremba was arrested for peacefully expressing her opinion over rising corruption in Zimbabwe and then released as if the government was being magnanimous. She was arrested because she said on social media, friends here is a principle. If you want your suffering to end you have to act. Action comes from hope. This the principle of faith and action which the government confused for insurrection. Zimbabwe's authorities need to get not only their semantics but also their understanding of human rights and free expression right. Said the statement. I am often embarrassed about my arrest because in the context of the situation in Zimbabwe it was quite insignificant. Others Zimbabweans who have dared to express opinions that are contrary to the opinions of the government or who have dared to impart knowledge that exceeds knowledge the Zimbabwean government would like its citizens to have have been treated far more severely. The journalist Hope Ochingono who reported extensively on corruption prior to last year's demonstration and opposition politician Jacob Hengarifwne who called for last year's protest were both arrested prior to the event. They were denied bail and detained for weeks. They were in prison at the time of the demonstration. Ochingono was arrested for a second time in January this year. Opposition politician Fadzaimahere who had been detained overnight at the same time that I was last year was also arrested again in January this year. The circumstances of these two January arrests were even more surreal than the circumstances of their arrests the previous year. On January 5 this year Zimlive a Zimbabwean online news platform ran the headline COVID-19 lockdown cop kills nine month old baby in bus stop rampage. Video footage of the incident circulated on social media. The footage showed a limp baby held in a woman's arms while the woman grabbed hold of a policeman cries of he killed the baby he killed the baby could be heard from the crowd. Shortly after the footage circulated, Chingono and Mahere were arrested for publishing falsehoods. The alleged offence was retweeting the video. Mahere was held for eight days. Chingono was held for several weeks. After the arrests had been affected had been affected the Zimbabwe Republic police released a statement to the effect that the baby had been treated at a state linked private hospital and all was well. However, journalists following up on the case reported on social media that they had been to the hospital in question or at least inquired at the hospital but had found no evidence of the baby having been treated there. A few days later Zimbabwe's single television channel, which is controlled by the state, broadcast a report in which a young woman stood with a baby in her arms and claimed to be the woman in the bus stop incident. In response to the reporter's questions she said her baby was alive and well and that she gave the interview because of the uproar on social media. I'd like to let that sink in. A young woman whose baby was limp in her arms a few days before claimed that she appeared on the news to report her baby's good health because of social media. An obvious concern expressed by many Zimbabweans is that the woman and child who appeared on the state controlled national news are not the woman and child who were involved in the incident. My profound concern is that even if they are the same individuals, a mother's reduction of her baby's health to a social media issue indicates that there is much more broken in Zimbabwe than can be measured and healed by GDP and related economic indicators that are used to assess a nation's progress. Completely groteschly, in the way that deflates but no longer surprises many Zimbabweans, at Shinono's hearing the state could not produce the retweet that he said he was said to have made. Shinono insists to this day, as he still awaits trial, that the retweet could not be produced for the courts because he did not retweet it in the first place. Mae Herre, as I and many others did also, did retweet the video of the bus stop incident. She erased it as soon as its veracity was questioned. English Pen was absolutely correct in describing the situation in Zimbabwe as being like a surreal novel. I could quote many other cases. For example, the story of a woman who was arrested at the police station where she had gone to report her husband's suspected abduction. I could tell you the story of three young women, all opposition members, who were charged with faking their own abduction when they reported having been abducted by alleged state agents. I could narrate the story of two young men being beaten bloody in July last year for daring to demonstrate while being asked who paid them to demonstrate. One of them sustained kidney damage and was denied appropriate treatment for many hours. Living under such circumstances takes its toll on every citizen in Zimbabwe. The story of the young men being beaten bloody while being interrogated to reveal who pays them to demonstrate is very chilling to me because such tactics were used during the 1970s armed struggle. In my mind, the continued use of such tactics through four decades of political independence indicates that there has not been a real demobilisation of the liberation army. In the 1980s, the Zannu Pief government committed genocide in Matabelle land. Even worse tactics from the armed struggle were used when Zannu Pief deployed its army in Matabelle land. Today, people of Matabelle land have begun to say to the rest of the country, we told you so. Now you see what your Zannu Pief really is. The Matabelle land genocide took place before the digital era. Zannu Pief was successful in effecting an almost complete glist shouting of information due to its control of the media, which was effectively absolute in those days. Today that situation has changed. Digital technology combined with social media platforms make it difficult for governments to carry out genocidal activities on the scale that they were carried out in Zimbabwe in the 1980s without the news reaching a global audience. Yet as the few examples of abductions, torture and judicial harassment which includes imprisonments without trial that I have shared show, the activities of the Zannu Pief authorities in Zimbabwe against its citizens continue to be oppressive and to violate fundamental human rights and freedoms and human dignity. My interaction with English Pen following last year's demonstration in Zimbabwe was not the first time I had engaged with Pen as an institution. On March 9, 2015, a young Zimbabwean man left his house after telling his wife that he was going to have a haircut at a nearby barber's shop. When the young man came out of the barber's shop after his hair had been cut, five men apprehended him and bundled him into a waiting unmarked vehicle. His family and friends never saw him again. The young man's name is Itaid Zamar. His whereabouts and what happened to him after he was unconstitutionally illegally deprived of his freedom remains a mystery to all but those who were involved in the abduction and the events that followed until today. Itaid Zamarra was a journalist who had given up professional journalism to become a well known activist. As an activist he was one of the first ordinary Zimbabweans to call publicly and consistently for the late second president of Zimbabwe Mr Mugabe to step down in order to make way for a transitional national arrangement. He made his call through a petition which he delivered by hand to the late former president Mugabe and as one of the founders of the Occupy Africa Unity Square movement in which he and other activists occupied a central square in Harare. In a protest whose aim was to push government to respond to citizens' demands. Even after being hospitalised for injuries resulting from beatings by the police. Itaid Zamarra used the news leader his Facebook page to foster peaceful protest against failures by the first Sonu Pief government and for a better national dispensation. In addition to being severely beaten Zamarra was warned by the Zimbabwean police before his abduction and disappearance. The macabre irony is that two years later in 2017 the Zimbabwean military accomplished what Zamarra and other civilians had not succeeded in doing. They forced Robert Mugabe to step down as president. Even more ironically the Zimbabwean military called on the people of Zimbabwe to support them in their effort to remove the sitting president. The surreal nature of these events was amplified many times when heeding the military's call tens of thousands of Zimbabweans thronged the streets to support the army's unconstitutional removal of Mr Mugabe from the presidency. I was very distressed by Itaid Zamarra's abduction. In addition to being disturbed by the abduction itself I was concerned that the absence of outraged outcries from literary circles in Zimbabwe. This is how I came to conceive of reviving pen Zimbabwe in 2015. The Zimbabwean chapter of pen had become dormant following the harassment and subsequent exile in the year 2001 of its long time president, the late Cengirai Hove, who led the organization from 1990 to 2007. With its president abroad, pen Zimbabwe disintegrated. I felt that an organization founded on the principles that guide pen institutions worldwide would provide a focal point from which writers could collectively support freedom of expression in Zimbabwe. Persuading Zimbabweans in the writing world to collaborate for the re-establishment of pen Zimbabwe was a challenge. I was expressly warned by one colleague not to mention Itaid Zamarra in my call for pen Zimbabwe's revival. However, two stalwarts of the Zimbabwean writing community came on board and with full support from Pen International the centre was re-established in 2016. Pen Zimbabwe now implements a programme of activities each year. Through reviving pen Zimbabwe I learnt more about pen, the organization and movement. The idea of pen developed out of a series of social meetings initiated by Catherine Aimee Dawson Scott during World War I, whose purpose was to introduce new English writers to establish writers in order to help the new writers' careers. As intolerance swept across Europe in the period between the wars, Ms Scott conceived of the idea of writers coming together to promote tolerance and freedom of expression. She prevailed upon the novelist John Galsworthy to become Pen's first president in 1921. As the first president, John Galsworthy wrote the first three articles of the pen charter to which all chapters of pen globally must commit. A fourth article was added later. I was particularly struck by the profundity and simplicity of the pen charter. Its four articles are one of the most moving statements of the role of literature and the importance and means of achieving freedom of expression that I have ever read. I would have liked very much to read the articles out in full this evening, but time does not allow. Ms Scott's vision for a community of writers has grown to include 145 centres in 104 countries, all of which have signed on to the pen charter. This is an extraordinary achievement. I see an equally striking trajectory and development in the scope of the three prizes that English Pen awards each year. These are the Pen Akely Prize, the Pen Hesall Tiltman Prize and the Pen Pinter Prize. English Pen introduced the Pen Akely Prize in 1982. It is awarded to an autobiography by a writer of British nationality. The Pen Hesall Tiltman Prize was first awarded in 2002. It is awarded to the best literary non-fiction historical book published in Britain. This prize represents a move to greater inclusion when recognising the value and excellence of literary works as an increasing diversity of individuals do qualify for the prize. However, writing history is itself an exclusive process. Time and research resources that are necessary for excellence in the genre can be accessed by few of us who have stories to tell and the will to tell them. In this sense, the Pen Pinter Prize, awarded in honour of the novelist and playwright Harold Pinter, is yet another action of English pens to increase the diversity of literary works to which its recognition can be extended. The Pen Pinter Prize may be awarded to a writer resident in Britain, the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth or former Commonwealth. First presented in 2009, the English Pen website tells me that the Pen Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer whose work is informed by an unflinching, unswerving gaze upon the world. While exhibiting a fierce intellectual determination to define the real truth of our lives and our societies. Today, English Pen's vision for the recognition of diverse kinds of literary work by diverse writers has resulted in my standing here today. I am happy and humbled that the jury of the 2021 Pen Pinter Prize judged my work to be of worthy character. I am grateful to my publishers Faber and Faber for their faith in a plodding writer from a crumbling country, who wished to bring the hopes and miseries, the triumphs and shattered dreams, the acts of courage and ruined personhoods of the women, children and men in her community to literature. I thank Lady Antonia Fraser for instituting the Pen Pinter Prize through English Pen and for her continued support of the award. My final word is about community. A key aim of Pen's founders was to establish a global community of writers. The role of this community in my doing as a writer has been significant as I have indicated this evening. It is a double honour for me to share the Pen Pinter Prize 2021 with Ugandan novelist and journalist Carquenza Ruchira Pashaija. He is the author of The Greedy Barbarians, a novel which explores themes of high-level corruption in a fictional country. And Banana Republic, where writing is treasonous, an account of his experiences in detention in 2020. The characteristics of repression in Uganda are very similar to those in Zimbabwe. It is with great appreciation that I shine a light on the courageous authorship of a writer from my continent, whose work portrays the struggle of the writers and people in Uganda, in Zimbabwe, elsewhere on the continent and indeed in the world. Thank you very much for your attention. Evening ladies and gentlemen, I am fully honoured for your price consideration and the unwavering support you have rendered to me since the Ugandan president interested himself in my books, in my literature and the persecution that came with such an evil interest. If it weren't for the Pen International, maybe I would still be somewhere in prison, perhaps forgotten. So, at this moment, firstly, I congratulate Miss Titsi for the deserved enterprise and also thank her for having chosen to share with me this wonderful prize. When I was hanging in the dungeons and chains, I saw my document as that I would never write again if they gave me a chance to read. You can imagine the condition I was in. So, as they were, I saw what they were as if they were some kind of deities or as if they were gold. Truth is, I survived death and I reached a point and regretted why I decided to come after the dictator using the pen. Anyway, how else would I have punished the dictator if not using the pen? I don't have a gun, so it is the only weapon I have. I debated against the idea of writing again. I wanted to put my code deal in a book. When I was in prison, I had already got another idea of writing again, but still I debated against it. But when I came out of prison and successfully began putting the infant on paper, my wife asked me, you know what are you doing? You are still sick, you are olympian, but you are on your computer busy. I am doing something very important and she was like, I hope you are not writing another book that will kill you. I would not tell her. So, I decided to keep writing secretly. When I finished writing it like this, that is when I was arrested again for the second time. And my wife had no idea why I was being arrested because I did not hear her. After editing it very well, I sent it to my publisher. I think maybe they were answering my email and they got a copy and they read through it. So, they came for me before I could even publish it. So, the first when I was taken to an interrogation room, they asked me, what is wrong with you? We beat you for writing, but again you keep writing. What is really the problem with you? What do you really want? So, I was also like, I have to put you on pages or in pages. If you keep me now, everyone will know about your infinity because it is already in writing. So, that is how they countered my intellectualism with his coviolence and I had no choice but to come back to them with Oed coviolence. I am not a foreigner saying, if you want to know a country, read its writers. So, these dictators will think that they will gag us because they have guns and they will use the guns to threaten us not to write what we want to write. It is so embarrassing. So, even if they kill me now, I do not regret writing what I wrote. So, I really appreciate Penn for advocating for my freedom of expression. The difference is over the world, Penn, America, Penn New Zealand, Penn South Africa, Penn Uganda, English Penn, Penn Canada, many others. That sent in local messages of courage. I received the messages with smiles. Even though I was in horrendous pain, I did appreciate. So, I really appreciate Penn for my expression, the advocacy, everything, the publicity. We received those messages. I still read them. Once again, I thank you for choosing me. I remain comprehensive to our size. Gosh, there are quite a few of you here. Congratulations. We are coming out this evening together. I'm Maureen Freely, chair of English Penn. I'd like to thank you all for joining us for this wonderful ceremony. On behalf of English Penn, I'd like to offer my deepest congratulations to Chichi Dacaremba, Kaquenza Luchirabashacha, the winners of this year's Penn Pinter Prize. May we have more poetical violence, please. Our sincere thanks to the judges on this year's prize, Andrew McMillan, Ella Wakatama and Claire Armistead. I'm sure you will agree that you have done a marvelous job. A huge thank you to the supporters of the prize and the British Library. Thank you also to the supporters of English Penn who make this work possible. In particular, our core funders, Arts Council England, the TS Eliot Foundation, our Silver Penn and Project Partners and of course our members. As a membership organisation, our members support our ability to be fiercely independent, international in outlook and deeply engaged in current and vital conversations around freedom of expression in the UK and internationally. Members are critical to us in continuing this work and we ask that you continue joining us. As we celebrate the wonderful work of this year's winners, we also think of those who cannot be with us. We speak of current Penn cases, including Nadim Turfent in Turkey, Pham Doan Trang in Vietnam, Dr Abdul Jalil Al Singes in Bahrain and last year's Penn Pinter Writer of Courage, the Eritrean writer Ammanuel Asrat. 2021 marks the 100th year of English Penn, which we have been celebrating with our centenary programme, Common Currency. As part of this, we have been running Penn Rights, our international letter writing campaign for decades. Penn has campaigned on behalf of writers who are unjustly persecuted, harassed and imprisoned in violation of the right to freedom of expression. We invite you to join supporters around the world to champion writers of courage by sending letters of solidarity to them and their families. You can find more information on how to join Penn Rights on our website. This is the eighth Penn Pinter Prize, with which I've had an honour to be involved, initially as judge and president of English Penn, more recently as its proud chair. This year will also be my last time with you as chair, as I'll be stepping down from the Board of Trustees in December. So, I would like to take this opportunity to give my personal thanks to Lady Antonia Frazier for her fine work and gracious guidance over the years. Most of all, for concentrating our minds on the true purpose of the prize, which is to honour writers of great distinction who have the courage and the words to speak truth to power. I would also like to thank our director, Dan Gorman, and the full English Penn team for their astonishingly wonderful work on behalf of silence writers everywhere, year in, year out, through thick and thin. Dan, Hannah, Kat, Debra, Will, Marion, Rachel, Sim, Nadia, Charlie, Anilicim. You are, every last one of you, amazing, and I shall miss you. Following the ceremony, do join us for a glass of wine in the bar to toast this year's winner. And now, to close the ceremony, I'm honoured to introduce Panash Chigolmatsu joining us from Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Zoom, who will be reading a newly commissioned piece they have created for this moment. Thank you very much. Your knowledge is now also in your body, every bit of it. Tambudzai Sigauke, who, since we first met her in nervous conditions, as a precocious girl who's not sorry when her brother dies, has come full circle in this mournable body's closing lines. Having spent years running away from the hard labouring life of the body, her mother is condemned to Kumaru Zeva, and into the life of the mind, Ma'am Nini opens up to her the mission score, it is the body Tambu returns to. Re-reading Tambu's return to her body, I recall my father's weekend ritual. Di Cymru, Tere Ranjama, he announces, I'm going to listen to the flesh. He's going to lie down, be still and listen to the rumblings of his flesh after the week's labour at his surgery. I've always found this, listening to the flesh, a curious statement. What is it that our flesh might have to tell us? But Christine gestures us and Tambudzai Sigauke, is that there's a bodily archive of knowledge that we carry in the flesh. Through our educations, as it was in Tambu's miseducation at Ma'am Nini's mission school and the young ladies' college of the Sacred Heart, we're taught to unlearn and distrust our embodied experiences, histories, knowledges and imaginations of the world in order to make disembodied pronouncements on it. This is to say, we're taught to stop listening to the flesh. Labouring side by side with her, Christine sees that Tambu has stopped trying to eat books. Tambu is now listening to the flesh. Tere Ranjama. As Houghton Spillers teachers, there's a historic distinction between the flesh and the body. Slavery and colonisation's economies of violence transformed our African flesh into bodies of labour and property stripped of our personhood. And yet, in our mother tongue, Chishona, in many African languages, Tambu would never have referred to herself as a black female body. She might try to refer to herself as Miri Wemukadzimutema, but Chishona doesn't conceive of Miri, the body as separate from the spirit, soul and mind. To speak of Miri is to invoke the person who lives inside the body. To speak of a body outside the person it belongs to is to speak of Chituna, a corpse. To speak then of Nyama, the flesh of a person's body is to invoke the most corporeal sight of a living person. The sight of living, breathing, feeling through which the world is experienced, encountered and absorbed. The flesh then is a sight of reconstruction, remembering and remembering of ourselves and of our worlds through what Tony Morrison called a knowing so deep. To return to the flesh, we must be alive to what has happened to our bodies. After all, our bodies are, to borrow from Basie Head, a question of power. If anon calls out, oh my body, make of me always a man who questions, Langarene Boy responds, oh my body, make of me always a woman who questions. Over the trilogy, nervous conditions, the book of not this vulnerable body, Langarene Boy explores black woman's bodies as questions of power. Tambu, whose body marks are unfit for the same education as her brother. Nyasha refused to eat and threw up when she did. Netsai, whose leg is blown off at the poongway. Sacred hearts, black girls punished for taking a shit in the white girls toilets and who have no place to dispose their soiled pads. Nesudwyd's breasts and buttocks exposed by the Jiren crowd. Mai takas leg broken by her husband. Tambu who feints hallucinates and like Nyasha ends up in psychiatric care. Through Langarene Boy's unflinching witness, the word is made flesh, the flesh is made word. Langarene Boy has shown us that hers is more than a textual vision of infleshing freedom. In 2020, alive to the cries, the sufferings and the yearnings of her people, Langarene Boy took a physical person out onto Harare's streets and posed her own body as a question to power. Placing her physical and textual bodies in the line of fire, Langarene Boy returns us to the flesh so that we, like Tambu, might remember ourselves and our worlds. Thank you.