Posted on May 17, 2022 by Eric Blair -
George Monbiot is an author, Guardian columnist and environmental activist. His best-selling books include Feral: Rewilding the land, sea and human life, Heat: how to stop the planet burning; and Out of the Wreckage: a new politics for an age of crisis. George cowrote the concept album Breaking the Spell of Loneliness with musician Ewan McLennan. His viral videos include How Wolves Change Rivers (viewed on YouTube over 40m times) and Nature Now, co-presented with Greta Thunberg (over 60m views). George’s latest book, Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet, will be published in May 2022.
His shortlisted pieces are:
Posted on April 7, 2021 by The Orwell Prize -
Annabel Deas is an investigative journalist at BBC Radio 5 Live based in Salford. In 2018 she was awarded funding by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to travel to the US to research best practice for telling the stories of marginalised people.
Deas writes: “Hope High is a 7 part podcast documenting the year I spent with a community in Huddersfield where a number of children were being exploited by county lines drug dealers. I made the podcast after being frustrated by news reports describing children involved in drug or knife crime as being “in a gang”. Children are not ‘gangsters’ and I wanted to discover the real reason why some children were selling drugs and carrying weapons. I worked closely with a secondary school where I got to know a number of pupils who were being exploited by county lines gangs. I spent a long time in the community so I could witness events as they unfolded in real time and attempt to understand where the gaps were which led to a small number of children being excluded from school, shot at, selling drugs or in prison. As I was working with vulnerable young people, a podcast was the ideal way of providing anonymity as I could change names and voices. After its release thousands of people contacted the BBC and myself to express thanks for explaining why these issues take place.” (The project is now being taught at A Level and on degree courses and is used as a resource by police and social services across the UK.)
Posted on April 7, 2021 by The Orwell Prize -
John Harris and John Domokos are the co-creators of The Guardian video series Anywhere But Westminster, which has been running for over ten years, chronicling and foreshadowing many of the tumultuous political events of the decade. Their aim has always been to turn political coverage on its head, and root their journalism far beyond centres of power, in the experiences of people and places too often ignored.
Posted on April 7, 2021 by The Orwell Prize -
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of Spring, Winter, Autumn, Public library and other stories, How to be both, Shire, Artful, There but for the, The first person and other stories, Girl Meets Boy, The Accidental, The whole story and other stories, Hotel World, Other stories and other stories, Like and Free Love. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. The Accidental was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. How to be both won the Bailey’s Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Autumn was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017 and Winter was shortlisted for The Orwell Prize for Books in 2018. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.
Smith, accepting her prize in a speech next to the mural of Orwell at Southwold Pier in Suffolk, sent this message:
The judges said:
The conclusion to Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet seals her reputation as the great chronicler of our age. Capturing a snapshot of life in Britain right up until the present day, Smith takes the emotional temperature of a nation grappling with a global pandemic, the brink of Brexit, heart-breaking conditions for refugees, and so much more. It will serve as a time-capsule which will prove to be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the mood of Britain during this turbulent time.”
Posted on April 7, 2021 by The Orwell Prize -
“A magnificent and moving account of everyday life in Putin’s Russia, this book explores the moral psychology of compromise and the difficulties of pursuing one’s ambitions, while living with integrity, or not, in the face of demands from an overmighty state. Beautiful and haunting, the book illuminates the challenges of moral life and the ways in which authoritarian rule is maintained.”
Posted on April 9, 2020 by The Orwell Prize -
This entry, informed by Ian’s family situation, exposed barbaric social evils taking place in the heart of our health system. It raises questions over the human rights of people with autism, learning disabilities and mental health problems – and poses questions about power abuses and state failures that lead to their needless, and sometimes fatal, incarceration. His campaign across several outlets has sparked five official inquiries and widespread debate.
Ian Birrell’s work is consistently of a high standard. He is fearless and rigorous, which are two of the qualities needed to win this prize. I have long been in awe of him and I hope this award will help highlight his work and bring it an even wider audience.” Iain Dale, Chair of Judges
Worse than BROADMOOR: Nurse whistleblower claims he has seen psychopathic serial killers cared for better than the autistic children he has witnessed being violently held down and force-fed drugs at health unit funded by the NHS (Daily Mail)
Dire mental health provisions are costing the lives of vulnerable teenagers (I News)
The country that closed its psychiatric hospitals, Italy believes anyone can live freely, with the right support (Tortoise)
Posted on April 9, 2020 by The Orwell Prize -
Submitted material
- ‘Clearing out my family home‘
- ‘Modern day serfs are invisible to us’
- ‘Corbyn is clueless about the working class’
Ben Fenton, Chair of Judges for The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2020, said:
To Orwell, as it says on the homepage of the Prize, the key was to make political writing into an art. If there was one piece out of the more than four hundred that we read which was art and politics weaved together in a journalistic tapestry, it was Janice Turner’s account of clearing her parents’ home after her mother went into care… The word Brexit does not appear in this piece, but the judges all agreed that the essence… oozed from every sentence.
Posted on April 7, 2020 by The Orwell Prize -
Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her poetry collection Slattern won a Forward Prize. Her short story ‘The Not-Dead and the Saved’ won both the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award and the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize. Her novel Meeting the English was shortlisted for the Costa Prize. Her BBC 3 radio programme about her work with students was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes prize. In 2018 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature, and an anthology of her students’ work, England: Poems from a School, was published to great acclaim. In 2019 she published Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, a book about her experience of teaching in state schools for several decades.
The judges said:
In this book, a brilliantly honest writer tackles a subject that ties so many people up in knots – education and how it is inexorably dominated by class. Yet this is the very opposite of a worthy lecture: Clanchy’s reflections on teaching and the stories of her students are moving, funny, full of love and offer sparkling insights into modern British society.”
Posted on April 7, 2020 by The Orwell Prize -
Colson Whitehead was born in 1969, and was raised in Manhattan. After graduating from Harvard College, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, books, and music. He is the author of The Nickel Boys, The Underground Railroad, The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and one collection of essays, The Colossus of New York. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, A Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Dos Passos Prize, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He lives in New York City. Before winning this year’s Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, The Nickel Boys also won the Pulitzer Prize, making Whitehead only the fourth writer ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice.
Posted on May 2, 2019 by The Orwell Prize -
Submitted material
“Whatever happened to Seymour Hersh?” (Prospect, 17/07/18)
“An island adrift: the inside story of how the Foreign Office is failing to prepare for Brexit” (Prospect, 15/10/18)
“The Corbyn doctrine” (Prospect, 15/06/18)
Posted on May 2, 2019 by The Orwell Prize -
Submitted material
“I thought remembrance was a celebration of war. I was wrong” (The Guardian, 12/11/18)
“I won’t be marching for a people’s vote. There has already been one” (The Guardian, 19/10/18)
“Monica Lewinsky has called out Clinton’s abuse of power. Why haven’t we?” (The Guardian, 01/04/18)
Posted on April 29, 2019 by The Orwell Prize -
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and the author of two critically acclaimed books, The Snakehead and Chatter. He received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2014, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016 and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowship at the New America Foundation.
This haunting and timely portrait of The Troubles opens with the disappearance of a mother of ten and radiates outwards to encompass the entire conflict, giving voice to characters and stories often shrouded in silence, and leaving an indelible and nuanced impression of the human cost of this unstable chapter of history.”
Ted Hodgkinson
Posted on April 29, 2019 by The Orwell Prize -
Milkman won the Man Booker Prize in 2018 the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2019. Anna Burns, born in Belfast, is the author of two other novels, No Bones and Little Constructions, and of the novella, Mostly Hero. No Bones won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Milkman is a remarkable book — recording a specific time and a specific conflict with brilliant precision but universal in its account of how political allegiances crush and deform our instinctive human loyalties. Its tone of voice — wry and funny, furious and compassionate — is a marvel.”
Tom Sutcliffe
Posted on April 29, 2019 by The Orwell Prize -
Submitted material
“What’s The Hidden Link Between Missing Children and the UK Drug Trade?”
“How Drug Dealing Gangs Are Taking Over the Countryside”
“Why London’s Teenagers Are Killing Each Other”
Max interviewed on Victoria Derbyshire about London Killings (BBC)
Posted on April 9, 2018 by The Orwell Prize -
“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
Posted on April 9, 2018 by The Orwell Prize -
“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
Posted on April 6, 2018 by The Orwell Prize -
“On the Edge was a piece of vivid, hard-hitting journalism, combining people’s experiences, data and analytic insight to show how so many people are being locked out and left behind by the way our economy works.” – Campbell Robb
“A brilliant combination of ice cold analysis, real human interest, great use and presentation of data and limpid writing – all of which takes the problems of one seaside town and sets them in a far wider context.” – Nick Timmins
Video content
Posted on March 15, 2017 by The Orwell Prize -
The result of the Brexit vote came as a shock to many commentators but perhaps not to those who had read Felicity Lawrence’s prescient long read on the world of migrant gangwork in Wisbech. Lawrence spent months getting beneath the clichés to unpick the reality of life in one of the country’s areas of highest migration, explaining why local residents had become so angry and alienated. Using the framework of one Latvian organised crime group, she painstakingly uncovered a parallel world in which illegality flourished. She described how a state in retreat had allowed foreign organized crime groups to thrive, brutally exploiting fellow migrants while leaving locals feeling abandoned by all except the far right.
Journalistic Writing and Audio Content