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 -
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 8, 2025 by Eric Blair -
From war zone dispatches to undercover exposés, Simon Murphy is an award-winning journalist.
Now a senior news reporter at the Mirror, he has worked in Fleet Street for over a decade.
Earlier this year, Simon reported from Ukraine – going inside hospitals and an underground school in a visit to a frontline city. For his Orwell prize entry, he worked with charities to cover the scandal of homeless women. The special investigation exposed the true scale of women sleeping rough. The probe formed part of the Mirror’s hidden homeless series, which was knitted together with a short documentary.
Simon is a five-time finalist at the British Journalism Awards, including winning New Journalist of the year in 2015. In 2024, he was a finalist in the business, finance and economics category for his Post Office scandal investigations.
His shortlisted pieces are:
Simon Murphy’s reporting for The Mirror was not only incredibly well written, but also excited me that red top newspapers are highlighting such a pressing issue in such an ethical way.
– Lorna Tucker, Judge, The Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness 2025
Posted on May 8, 2025 by Eric Blair -
Jenny Kleeman is a journalist, broadcaster and author. She writes long form journalism for the Guardian, the Financial Times Magazine and the Sunday Times Magazine. A regular voice on BBC Radio 4, Jenny writes and presents the documentary series The Gift, and has reported for BBC One’s Panorama and Channel 4’s Dispatches, as well as making 13 films from across the globe for Channel 4’s Unreported World. Her first book, Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, was published in 2020 and has been translated into eleven languages. Her second book The Price of Life, was published in March 2024.
Her shortlisted pieces are:
The hallmark of all of Jenny Kleeman’s reports is her empathetic analysis of people with extraordinary ambitions or in life-changing circumstances. Her writing brings out the humanity of her subjects with emotional intelligence and great sensitivity. Her writing on American pronatalists, or Israelis who want dead soldiers to live on through harvesting their semen, never stooped to cliche or caricature, even when it shocked. Orwell wanted good prose to have purpose and reject humbug, and Kleeman’s writing fits that mould.
– Matt Walsh, Chair of Judges, The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2025
Posted on May 22, 2024 by James Tookey -
In the summer of 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did something unthinkable: they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain – and held a picnic. They were joined by East German holidaymakers in Ladas rolling up for goulash, beer and brass-bands. I did not know this story and I loved the way it surprised me and captured the time, the idealism, and the role of ordinary citizens in the unravelling of the Iron curtain – as well as its echoes for today. Wonderfully told through extensive interviews with everyone from the human rights activist who came up with the madcap idea, the stubborn young woman who made it happen, to Stasi agents and border guards.
Christina Lamb, Orwell Prize for Political Writing judge 2024
Posted on May 22, 2024 by James Tookey -
A novel exploring the fallout of the 1984 shootings at the Libyan embassy in London, and its effect on three friends. The quietness of the prose belies the event’s traumatic drama and its profound personal and political repercussions. The style is old fashioned – genteel almost – and authentic to the point of reading like the most exquisite memoir. A warm and extraordinarily clear-sighted novel that is, in part, about the power of the literary word to effect real-world change.
Simon Okotie, Orwell Prize for Political Fiction judge 2024
Posted on May 22, 2024 by Eric Blair -
Unheard Voices are a group of community reporters living in Greater Manchester with experience of unfit housing and/or homelessness.
In summer 2022, a community reporting network was formed in Manchester with a group of people with lived experience of unfit housing and homelessness. Unheard Voices started to collect and share their stories of the housing emergency, finally publishing two co-created pieces of work in summer 2023.
Unheard Voices want society to see people experiencing homelessness and unfit housing as humans, rather than numbers. By telling their stories, and their truth, they want to transform how the housing emergency is perceived, challenging stereotypes and breaking down stigma.
Submitted pieces:
- Unheard Voices Microsite: In this collection of reports, Unheard Voices share their stories, insights and experiences of trying to navigate a housing system that is not fit for purpose
- The Manchester Maze: the maze is a concept created by the group – a collection of human stories and an action plan based on what they think needs to change.
This community reporting project was funded by the charity, Shelter UK, in partnership with On Our Radar.
Posted on May 22, 2024 by Eric Blair -
Wendell Steavenson is a writer and journalist. She has written for The Guardian, the Financial Times, Granta, and The New Yorker, among other publications, and is the author of three nonfiction books and two novels. Over the past two years, she has reported from Ukraine as well as Georgia and Israel Palestine for 1843 magazine. She was a Neiman Fellow in 2014 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2021. Her book Circling the Square was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Books in 2016.
Her shortlisted pieces are:
We were struck by the commitment and versatility of Wendell Steavenson who contributed two forceful and stark dispatches from the Ukraine before pivoting after October 7th to the Gaza conflict and producing a meticulous account of an attack on a kibbutz which is – irrespective of one’s position – unarguably an outstanding piece of reporting. Good prose is like a windowpane, Orwell wrote, and Steavenson’s is admirably clear.
– Janice Gibson, Chair of Judges, The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2024
Posted on November 14, 2023 by Eric Blair -
Freya Marshall Payne is a writer and doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. She is working on a history of women’s homelessness and is especially interested in life-writing, oral history and activism. Freya jointly won the inaugural Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness in 2023. Her writing has appeared in publications including The Guardian, the TLS and Prospect Magazine.
Submitted material:
Posted on November 14, 2023 by Eric Blair -
Daniel Lavelle writes on mental health, homelessness and social care. He received the Guardian’s Hugo Young award in 2017, and is the author of Down and Out.
Submitted material:
Posted on May 10, 2023 by Eric Blair -
Shanti Das is a reporter at the Observer. She previously worked as a reporter for The Sunday Times and prior to that was based in New York and Bristol for SWNS, the UK’s largest independent press agency. Her investigative series, Care workers trapped in debt bondage, exposed how migrant workers hired as part of a government drive to plug staffing shortages are being systematically subjected to abuse and illegal recruitment practices.
Her shortlisted pieces are:
Posted on May 10, 2023 by Eric Blair -
Mark Townsend is the Observer’s home affairs editor and was previously a foreign reporter for the paper. He is a former British Press Awards news reporter of the year. His investigation The disappeared: how the Home Office allowed the mass kidnapping of children from its care exposed the wilful neglect of the Home Office towards some of the most vulnerable in society. It revealed how, despite taking effective custody of unaccompanied asylum seeking children in an undeclared policy that bypassed parliamentary scrutiny, the government turned a blind eye as young people were abducted.
His shortlisted pieces are:
Posted on May 10, 2023 by Eric Blair -
Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester in England. Formerly a columnist at The Guardian he is an editorial board member of the Nation magazine and the Alfred Knobler Fellow for Type Media. His book Another Day in the Death of America was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Books in 2018 and in 2021 he was also shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Journalism for bringing ‘the eloquence of an expert journalist and the depth of an academic’ to his reporting on the role of racism and inequality in the pandemic.
His shortlisted pieces are:
Posted on May 9, 2023 by James Tookey -
Tom Crewe was born in Middlesbrough in 1989. He has a PhD in nineteenth century British history from the University of Cambridge. Since 2015, he has been an editor at the London Review of Books, to which he contributes essays on politics, art, history and fiction. Boyd Tonkin, Chair of Judges, praised how the book:
…re-imagines the lives of the late Victorian writers Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds in the immediate aftermath of the trials and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. The fictionalised characters – John and Henry, and their wives Catherine and Edith – are brought to vivid life by Crewe, who writes about their social, intellectual and erotic lives with extraordinary verisimilitude. Wonderfully precise about things that themselves do not always seem appropriate to precision, the novel considers the similarities between desire and intellectual life, which both risk producing things that may ultimately prove abortive or bathetic. Crewe stays brilliantly faithful to the language, the outlook and the conventions of 1890s London even as he shows, and investigates, the distance between then and now. With compassion, lucidity and poise he explores both the creation of new sexual identities and the nature of social activism, as the ideals of liberation tangle with shame, fear and doubt.”
Posted on May 9, 2023 by James Tookey -
Peter Apps is an award-winning journalist and Deputy Editor at Inside Housing. He broke a story on the dangers of combustible cladding thirty-four days before the Grenfell Fire. His coverage of the public inquiry has received widespread acclaim. He lives in London. Our 2023 judging panel, chaired by Martha Lane Fox, said:
A magnificent book that deftly combines vivid, compelling accounts of the victims of the fire with forensic (but no less engaging) detail on the decades of politics and policy which led up to it. Expect to find yourself crying over details of building regulations you never knew existed – and over the fact that so many of us let shifts in such regulations go unnoticed, to such devastating impact. Show Me the Bodies has the values of The Orwell Prize at its core: it is beautiful writing about a devastating subject that we should all understand.”
Posted on May 17, 2022 by Eric Blair -
It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him — and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.
Adam Roberts, Chair of The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2022, commented:
Posted on May 17, 2022 by Eric Blair -
The Western world has turned its back on refugees, fuelling one of the most devastating human rights disasters in history.
In August 2018, Sally Hayden received a Facebook message. ‘Hi sister Sally, we need your help,’ it read. ‘We are under bad condition in Libya prison. If you have time, I will tell you all the story.’ More messages followed from more refugees. From there began a staggering investigation into the migrant crisis across North Africa.
My Fourth Time, We Drowned follows the shocking experiences of refugees seeking sanctuary, but it also surveys the bigger picture: the negligence of NGOs and corruption within the United Nations; the economics of the twenty-first-century slave trade and the EU’s bankrolling of Libyan militias; the trials of people smugglers; the frustrations of aid workers; the loopholes refugees seek out and the role of social media in crowdfunding ransoms. Who was accountable for the abuse? Where were the people finding solutions? Why wasn’t it being widely reported?
David Edgerton, the Chair of Judges for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022, commented:
Posted on May 17, 2022 by Eric Blair -
Ed Thomas is a Special Correspondent at BBC News. His reporting inside Wandsworth Prison and the inequality exposed by Covid won Royal Television Society awards in 2017 and 2022. His work often focuses on communities and people struggling to be heard in modern Britain and his extended reports feature on the BBC News at Ten and BBC online. Over the past 12 months Ed, with picture correspondent Phill Edwards and Senior Producer Lou Martin spent months in Burnley to witness the impact of the pandemic on the poorest, their reporting was an unflinching look at the lives of those in the most deprived areas of England.
His shortlisted pieces are: