Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
Liam Thorp is the multi-award winning political editor of the Liverpool Echo. As well as covering politics across Merseyside and beyond, Liam has developed a reputation for in-depth investigations looking at social issues such as homelessness, poverty and how government policy affects lives.
Liam has been named Regional Press Specialist Journalist of the Year on three separate occasions. He was previously nominated for an Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness in 2024 and has also been nominated for a Private Eye Paul Foot Award for investigative journalism.
In recent years, Liam has reported from the frontline of Liverpool’s traumatic homelessness crisis, which has seen an explosion of people living without stable accommodation and a cash-strapped city council struggling to cope. His detailed and emotive writing has seen him spend time with those living on the streets or in cramped, temporary accommodation as well as those trying to help. He has analysed the perfect storm of factors leading to this crisis in a major UK city – with his work being shared and praised nationwide.
Liam lives in south Liverpool with his wife, 20-month-old son and their Romanian rescue dog.
His shortlisted entries are:
This is regional journalism at its finest. Impactful reporting and a real eye-opening insight into the very human plight of single mum’s caught up in Liverpool’s housing crisis.
– Caroline Wheeler, Judge, The Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness 2025
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
Vladislav Zubok has produced an extraordinarily comprehensive account of the Cold War from 1945 to its apparent demise in 1991. He manages to incorporate the perspectives of nearly all the many states across the globe that became involved at some time or another. This is a scholarly, well researched book that nevertheless never loses its clear narrative drive.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
Growing up, Edward Wong didn’t hear his father talk much about the older man’s life in China. Perhaps that’s why Wong found himself retracing the elder Wong’s footsteps through the borderlands of the Chinese empire, in his work as the New York Times’s Beijing correspondent. Hong Kong, Harbin, Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia. The lives of the two men weave together to form the thread connecting this grand yet personal account of 70 years of Chinese history.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
War throws into sharp relief what’s important to us. It forces us to decide what we save and what we sacrifice. Simon Parkin takes us to the darkest days of the Nazi siege of Leningrad, where a group of botanists faced a terrible dilemma. Having amassed the world’s greatest seed bank in the hope of ending famine for all humans one day, they now guarded their vast stash of nutritious specimens at the heart of a city that was starving to death. Artfully told, this is a beautiful and harrowing tale of science, politics and principle in times of war.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
The title implies this is a family memoir against a dramatic historical backdrop. It is – and much more. Mishal Husain’s painstaking research allows us to share a view onto the tumult in the Indian sub-continent, before, during and after the end of British colonial rule. The threads of her family’s histories weave with those of Partition. They are as relevant and current as ever and show us what the enduring conflict arising from those times means to human life. It’s painful as well as painstaking. It’s beautiful.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
Gabriel Gatehouse has taken us on a deep dive in the dark and toxic waters of the American conspiracy theory epidemic. Why are the Clintons the target of so much craziness? What lies behind QAnon? Who planned the 6 January assault on the Capitol? It’s all here in this riveting page turner, alongside a cast of characters ranging from the eccentric through the exotic to the downright sinister. The conclusion? You couldn’t make it up. But it’s real, it is doing profound damage to the fabric of America, and sometime soon, the virus will reach our shores.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
Vladimir Putin was mocked for being a bore when he lectured Fox News’s Tucker Carlson about Russian history from the 9th century onwards. But this book proves that the past holds many valuable lessons for the Russia of today, in particular the power of the Orthodox Church for would-be rulers of Russia. Ash deftly recounts a concise and never-boring timeline of the collaboration and competition between the Church and the state throughout the centuries, building up a powerful thesis: under Putin’s Russia, the Church has once again become an arm of the state.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
Anne Applebaum provides a thoroughly documented survey of the way in which autocratic regimes around the world are involved in deep webs of corruption and impunity. She achieves this with a cool analytical tone that never lapses into rage; that leaves much for readers to feel and express themselves.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
This is a memoir about a war not yet ended, which could have undermined its power. Yet from the opening chapter to the close, the power of the image of women looking at war is relentless and necessary. Amelina is setting off for a holiday with her young son as the war comes chasing after her and everyone else in Ukraine. She is finishing a funding application for a literary festival whilst standing in the security queue at the airport, checking her phone for news and “thinking about my new gun and why I, a nearsighted bookworm, decided to buy it”. Thus a beautifully written book, technically unfinished but with a tragic completeness, unfolds.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
‘The Ministry of Truth is now tightening its grip by the hour,’ comments one character in Edward St. Aubyn’s new book, a state-of-the-nation novel that brilliantly uses the conventions of farce, satire and social critique to evoke a nation drifting indifferently into chaos. Written in riotously creative language, St. Aubyn’s portrait of the family and its sharp-edged sketches of various institutions of British life are often very, very funny and always penetrating; but they are also at times moving, especially when they relate to mental health. Parallel Lines, which never seems parochial despite its apparently insular metropolitan setting, reinvents the so-called Hampstead novel with formal verve and political vitality.
Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
The interconnectedness of water and human experience are beautifully expressed in Elif Shafak’s epic century-spanning novel, taking in Nineveh and London, the Thames and the Tigris, Gilgamesh and Dickens. This is truly ambitious and profound writing, in which a number of political and moral questions, about religion, heritage, imperialism and the climate, are elegantly raised and explored.
Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
Twenty-one voices from a small town in Ireland come together to paint a picture of a community in all its complexity: after the economic crisis, there are dark undercurrents of criminality moving through to fill the gaps left by a lack of jobs and hope. But there is also tenderness and beauty. All of life is here, and the way ordinary lives are shaped by forces outside of their control is powerfully evoked.
Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
This cleverly conceived, inventively written political fable proves propulsively readable. Dedicated to ‘all the people who lose their lives trying to reach a safer shore,’ The Accidental Immigrants centres on a British couple living on an island in the Mediterranean that, as the Far Right rises, find themselves first disconcerted but then displaced and torn apart by increasingly totalitarian state policies and policing. McMillan’s characters might inhabit a Looking-Glass universe, but in reading this incisive critique of anti-immigration politics we stare straight back at ourselves. This humane, sensitive novel is insidiously shocking; and it looks set to become even more politically relevant given recent electoral results in the UK, Europe and the US.
Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
In his fictional account of the affair between ageing British prime minister H.H. Asquith and the vivacious young aristocrat Venetia Stanley during the summer of 1914, Robert Harris brings one of the most consequential chapters of modern history to life. Precipice spins a riveting drama around Asquith’s surviving letters to his lover, in which he details his romantic yearnings alongside top-secret intelligence as Europe hurtles headlong into world war one. In doing so, the novel – with great deftness and wit – explores the extent to which political power is shaped by the personal lives of those who wield it.
Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
Don’t be fooled by The Harrow’s seeming simplicity or by its uncluttered directness. It is a thriller and whodunit, yes. But it is also a novel rousingly elevated beyond its genre by a greater purpose, its analysis of council politics and the inevitable – but sad and irretrievable – loss of local journalism.
Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
Nobody in current British politics – Left or Right, Righteous or Heartless, selfish or selfless – escapes from Natasha Brown’s short but weighty Universality unscathed. This is a smart, uncompromising novel from a talented, intrepid writer. All while being an gripping thriller, too.
Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
The lives of four interconnected women – their loves, their ambitions, their disappointments, their traumas – are scrutinised in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s dazzling fourth novel. Set across three continents and a sprawling cast of characters, Dream Count is a polyphonic work that engages with a range of charged themes, from the diaspora experience to sexual assault and the politics of female bodies. It is rigorously, bracingly contemporary – and yet it has a timelessness that characterises all great fiction.
Orwell Prize for Political Fiction panel
Posted on May 12, 2025 by Eric Blair -
Vicky Spratt is an award-winning journalist, author, and housing rights advocate. Her book TENANTS was a Financial Times book of the year in 2022. She is a columnist and housing correspondent at The i Paper where her work has seen her nominated for a British Journalism Award and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. In 2017, her campaign succeeded in getting letting fees banned. Since then, she has given evidence in Parliament and been name-checked by ministers on the floor of the House of Commons because of her reporting on homelessness. Her work has contributed to several other major policy changes. Vicky has presented
documentaries for Radio 4 and the BBC. She has also regularly appears on flagship news programmes such as Newsnight, the Andrew Marr Show, and BBC News and is a regular contributor to Radio 4, LBC, and the Newsagents podcast. Her long-form interview about the economics of the housing crisis with Novara Media was one of their most viral yet. Vicky is regularly asked to speak at political conferences with both government and opposition ministers and changemakers, she has interviewed key political figures such as Michael Gove, Jeremy Corbyn, and Angela Rayner and spoken at literary festivals from Edinburgh to Hay as well as music festivals such as Bristol’s Forwards festival. She has been invited to Glasgow and Rotterdam to speak about her work. Her writing on abortion rights and women’s life choices has also appeared in ELLE Magazine, Refinery29, VICE, and the Guardian. Her second book We Were Promised The Moon will be published by 4th Estate in 2026.
Her shortlisted pieces are:
The panel deeply appreciates Vicky’s sustained and vital commitment to reporting on homelessness.”
– Ligia Teixeira, Chair of Judges, The Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness 2025