UEA’s inaugural International Chair in Creative Writing, the Booker-shortlisted Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga, has been named as the winner of the 2021 PEN Pinter Prize, which is awarded annually to a writer resident in Britain, the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth or former Commonwealth 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’. Dangarembga (pictured) is the author of plays, filmscripts and novels including Nervous Conditions (1988), which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and This Mournable Body, which was published by Faber and shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. She was arrested last year in Zimbabwe for participating in a peaceful anti-government protest.