Tony Winning Playwright Tom Stoppard to Receive PEN/Pinter Award

Four-time Tony Award winning playwright Tom Stoppard has been chosen to receive the 2013 PEN/Pinter prize, a literary honor established in 2009 in memory of the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter. He will receive his award at an event at the British Library on October 7th.

The Prize is given annually to a British writer or a writer resident in Britain 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'.

The prize is shared with an international writer of courage selected by English PEN's Writers at Risk 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.

Stoppard's work for the stage includes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Indian Ink, The Invention of Love, The Coast of Utopia (winner of the most Tony Awards of any new play on Broadway) and Rock 'n' Roll.

His translations and adaptations include works by Lorca, Nestroy, Schnitzler, Molnar, Pirandello and Chekhov. Among his television credits are: Professional Foul and Squaring the Circle.

Film credits Billy Bathgate, Empire of the Sun, Enigma and Shakespeare in Love. He directed the film of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. For radio he has written: If You're Glad, I'll Be Frank, Albert's Bridge and In the Native State.

In 2006 Stoppard's multi award-winning Rock 'n' Roll opened at the Royal Court. The production, directed by Trevor Nunn, subsequently enjoyed a sell-out West End run as well as a season on Broadway produced by Sonia Friedman Productions.

Source: Englishpen.org

Photo Credit: Walter McBride / WM Photos

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