2025 Journalism prize finalist

Hannah Barnes

The New Statesman

Hannah Barnes is an Associate Editor and Writer at the New Statesman, where she focuses on the topics and stories shaping the world we live in. An award-winning journalist, she spent 15 years at the BBC specialising in analytical and investigative journalism on both television – for BBC Newsnight – and radio. Hannah produced, edited and reported a variety of Radio 4’s best known news and current affairs shows. Her book – Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children – is a Sunday Times Bestseller and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

Her shortlisted pieces are:

• The Trauma Ward
• The Intolerant Age
• How children’s gender care went so wrong

We were struck by the forceful clarity of Hannah Barnes’s writing. Whether using her own experience of trauma in childbirth to shine a light on an under-reported element of becoming a parent, or challenging the growing censoriousness of British public life, Barnes’s writing was purposeful, clear and refreshingly lacking in cliche.

– Matt Walsh, Chair of Judges, The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2025