IPA Freedom to Publish committee chose writer due to his ‘disgraceful ongoing punishment and the extreme risk he ran to express his ideas’

Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for publishing a liberal blog, is to be awarded the International Publishers Association’s Prix Voltaire for his contribution to freedom of speech.

Badawi, who has four children, was arrested in 2012 on a charge of insulting Islam and indicted on several charges including apostasy. He was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes in 2013, and then re-sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison plus a fine in 2014. The sentence was upheld by the Saudi supreme court in June. In December, it was reported that Badawi had gone on hunger strike.

His wife Ensar Haider Mohammed, who is travelling to London to collect the award on Badawi’s behalf, has called on the world’s writers to continue applying pressure of regimes that do not tolerate free speech.

“Raif has become a symbol for the fight for freedom of expression and the right to publish ideas in writing,” she told the Guardian in an email. “My husband once wrote that freedom of expression is the ‘air that any thinker breathes and the fuel that ignites the fire of his or her ideas’, and he was right.

“This is why he is wasting away in jail today, and precisely why the world’s free writers should use their freedom of expression as a weapon in the war on oppression.”

Mohammed will collect the award, including a prize of more than £7,000, at a ceremony in London on Sunday evening.

The award, which was this year renamed from the IPA Freedom to Publish prize, recognises a “person or organisation that has made an important contribution to defence and promotion of freedom to publish”. The prize money will be used by the Raif Badawi foundation to continue campaigning for his release and promote free speech in Saudi Arabia.

Badawi was chosen from a shortlist of finalists which included Bangladeshi publisher Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury, who was nearly killed by Islamic extremists last year, and the five book publishers and sellers who went missing in locations including Thailand and Hong Kong only to reappear in Chinese custody months later.

IPA Freedom to Publish committee chair Ola Wallin said: “We had many deserving candidates this year, but clearly Raif’s disgraceful ongoing punishment and the extreme risk he ran to express his ideas – and those of other free-thinkers – caught the imagination of the IPA’s Freedom to Publish Committee.”

IPA president Richard Charkin said: “The worldwide publishing community will continue to highlight the plight of oppressed publishers and writers like Raif. If we don’t, unscrupulous regimes everywhere will only tighten their grip further.”

Last year Badawi received another award: the EU’s Sakharov prize for human rights. At the time, European parliament president Martin Schulz urged the king of Saudi Arabia to free Badawi in order to accept it.