Exiled Bangladeshi publisher Tutul wins free speech prize; shares award with Atwood
LONDON – A Bangladeshi author and publisher injured in an attack by suspected militants has won a writing award celebrating free speech.
Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury shares the PEN Pinter prize with Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood. The award was announced Thursday in London.
Chowdhury, known as Tutul, founded a magazine and publishing house to publish liberal Bangladeshi bloggers and writers.
Several of its contributors have been murdered in a wave of attacks by Islamist militants on secular bloggers and online activists. Chowdhury was critically injured in a machete and gun attack in 2015, and now lives in Norway.
The award was established in 2009 in memory of Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter. It goes jointly to a British, Irish or Commonwealth writer and to an international writer who has faced persecution.
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