"Courageous and irreverent" novelist and playwright Hanif Kureishi has won this year's PEN Pinter prize, which goes to a writer who – in the words of Harold Pinter's Nobel speech – casts an "unflinching, unswerving" gaze upon the world.

Pinter's widow, Lady Antonia Fraser, and a panel of judges including Lisa Appignanesi and Mariella Frostrup chose Kureishi as winner of the award established last year by English PEN in memory of the Novel-winning dramatist, its former vice-president. The prize aims to honour a writer of "outstanding literary merit" who exemplifies Pinter's own "fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies".

Fraser said Pinter "would have been proud" of the selection of Kureishi, author of the Whitbread award-winning novel The Buddha of Suburbia and the Oscar-nominated screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette. "Hanif Kureishi courageously and irreverently speaks the truth about life in our multicultural world, beyond any platitudes of political correctness," she said.

Kureishi will receive his prize on 20 October, when he will also present the International Writer of Courage prize – for an author who has been persecuted for speaking out about his or her beliefs – to Mexican journalist and human rights activist Lydia Cacho. Cacho, a columnist for the Mexico City newspaper El Universal, was imprisoned, harassed and tortured after publishing a book exposing a child pornography ring in 2005. Although she has now been cleared of defamation charges, she is still subjected to death threats and harassment.

Last year, poet and playwright Tony Harrison won the inaugural PEN Pinter prize, worth £1,000.