“This year’s winner – Carole Cadwalladr – deserves high praise for the quality of her research and for her determination to shed fierce light on a story which seems by no means over yet. Orwell would have loved it.” – David Bell
‘The Good Daughter‘, The New Statesman, 18/05/2017
‘Why do so many teenage girls want to be boys?‘ The Times, 11/11/2017
‘The battle over gender turns bloody‘, The Times, 16/09/2017
“Mark Mazower’s memoir of his father is filled with history’s great events: the massacre of Jews in Lithuania and the Siege of Stalingrad among them. But Mazower brings to life not only a son’s gradual piecing together of his family’s life, but also a deep and rewarding sense of their inner lives and thoughts.” – Alex Clark
In the centenary of the Russian Revolution, What You Did Not Tell recounts a brand of socialism erased from memory – humanistic, impassioned, and broad-ranging in its sympathies. But it also explores the unexpected happiness that may await history’s losers, the power of friendship, and the love of place.
“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
How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world – from American ‘shooters’ and ISIS to Trump? Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the eighteenth century, before leading us to the present.
This collection of Laurie Penny’s writing covers everything from the shock of Donald Trump’s election and the victories of the far right, to online harassment and the transgender rights movement. These darkly humorous articles provoke challenging conversations about the definitive social issues of today.