Book prize winner
Poverty Safari
Published by: Luath Press
“I’m absolutely delighted that Darren McGarvey’s book Poverty Safari has won the Orwell Prize. His unflinching account of his life and the effects of deprivation and poverty is self-aware, brutally honest and more urgent than ever. If Orwell were alive, this is the book he would choose.” – Kit de Waal
“George Orwell would have loved this book. It echoes Down and Out in London and Paris and The Road to Wigan Pier. It is heart-rending in its life story and its account of family breakdown and poverty. But by the end there is not a scintilla of self-pity and a huge amount of optimism. It made me see the country and its social condition in a new light.” – Andrew Adonis
“Can a leftwing structural critique be married to an ethics of personal responsibility? This is the big question at the heart of Darren McGarvey’s vivid, passionate and relentlessly self-questioning memoir, which all the judges agreed was a book for our times” – Lorien Kite
“What distinguishes Poverty Safari from a ‘straight’ description of a working-class life is his searing examination of the narratives that surround poverty – and the way in which no individual, least of all him, can neatly be fitted into them.” – Alex Clark
