The 4th Lee Hochul Literary Prize for Peace announces:

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The 4th Lee Hochul Literary Prize for Peace announces

Arundhati Roy has been selected
as the Grand Laureate of this year

- The actual award ceremony has been postponed to next year, due to the COVID-19 related circumstances. Also the honorarium for the prize
(50 million KRW) will be awarded to the Grand Laureate, following the ceremony next year
- The online press conference with Arundhati Roy was held on 10 Nov. 2020 via a Zoom meeting in Korea Press Center (Seoul).

The Selection Committee of the Lee Hochul Literary Prize for Peace (the LLPP) and the Eunpyeong-gu District Office have selected Arundhati Roy as the Grand Laureate of this year.

The LLPP is an international literary award which takes place in the Republic of Korea annually in order to promote peace. There are two awards: the main Lee Hochul Literary Prize for Peace, and a Special Award which is given to a young and upcoming Korean writer. The main prize winner receives a monetary sum of 50 million won, while the Special Award winner receives 20 million won.
The Lee Hochul Literary Prize for Peace was established in 2017 by the Eunpyeong-gu District Office of Seoul, South Korea, in honor of the author Lee Ho-chul. Lee Ho-chul is a symbolic figure whose literary works reflect a deep longing for peace and the harmony of two Korean people.

The Grand Laureate of this year, Arundati Roy, won the Booker Award for her first novel, The God of Small Things, and made a brilliant start in 1997. She has since focused on civil movements and nonfiction writing to resist religious and class conflict and discrimination, and the tyranny of capital and power around the world. In her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, published 20 years after the debut, Roy criticized the discrimination and oppression against Muslim minorities.

The Selection Committee of the LLPP explained the reason for the selection, saying, "Roy’s literary spirit has been in line with that of the writer Lee Ho-chul in that she has relentlessly sought peace in the history of India with fierce problem consciousness."

Eunpyeong-gu (Gu Mayor Kim Mi-kyung) held an online press conference with Arundhati Roy on the 19th floor of the Korea Press Center's press conference at 14:00 on Tuesday, November 10, 2020. The actual award ceremony has been postponed to next year, due to the COVID-19 related circumstances. Also the honorarium for the prize (50 million KRW) will be awarded to the Grand Laureate, following the ceremony next year

In the online interview, Roy, who met with Korean reporters via Zoom, said “the artist's role is to write about the world in which one lives." She pointed out, "the Western liberal discourse in the past has separated art and politics in a very artificial way; so there has been sort of suspicion that art and literature should be separated from politics, and that is a way of maintaining the status quo." At the same time, she made it clear that she was opposed to using novels as a means of delivering political messages. According to her, a novel is to see and write the complexity that exists in the world as it is, whether it is politics or gender, and expressed her belief in novels by saying, “Fiction (fiction) is truth.” She also said that the honorarium for the prize (50 million KRW) will go towards helping people out once she is awarded next year.

Reports by Major Newspapers in Korea

Politics Cannot Be Excluded from Art; Fiction Is a Deeper Truth than Reality

The Kyung hyang - JOOYOUNG MOON

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I Am Not a Social Activist; I Only Face Conflict with a Pen

The Chosun - SUGIN BAIK

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It’s a Writer’s Job to Write about the World I live in.

The Hankyoreh - JAEBONG CHE

View Article

Arundhati Roy Receives the Lee Hochul Literary Prize for Peace

The Yonhap news - SEONGWOO LEE