Category: EventsTTTT

Speakers

Details

This year’s Orwell Prize shortlists will be announced at the Boardroom, University of Westminster, Regents Street on Tuesday 24th April, ahead of a debate: Our overwhelmingly white media are inevitably delivering ‘white news’.

There will be drinks from 6.30pm, with this year’s Orwell Prize shortlists – for the Book Prize, Journalism Prize and Blog Prize – being announced at 7pm. The debate will follow the shortlist announcements.

Entry is free, but places are limited, so RSVP to katriona.lewis@mediastandardstrust.org is essential. Please feel free to share the invitation with friends and colleagues.

Shortlist debate image courtesy of Jessy Boon Cowler.

Speakers

Details

So far, the courtroom drama of the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics has featured journalists, editors and victims of press intrusion in the lead roles – but the relationship between politicians and the press will soon be centre stage. A former national political editor, a campaigner for the public inquiry and historian of spin, and former spin doctor and journalist consider what the next act might be for politics and the press.

Links

• George Orwell: The Freedom of the Press – proposed preface to Animal Farm (1945, first published TLS, 1972)

Speakers

Details

A classic of reportage, Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier and the experiences which featured in it were critical in the development of his political views and commitment to democratic socialism. Our panellists make the journey back to the 1930s, and recount their own experiences of following in Orwell’s footsteps, accompanied along the way by Orwell biographer, D. J. Taylor.

Links

• George Orwell: The Road to Wigan Pier
• The Road to Wigan Pier diary blog

Speakers

Details

75 years ago, George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War, an experience which was crucial to his later political work, nearly killed him, and formed the basis of Homage to Catalonia. Our experts look back at the Spanish War, and reflect on the past, the present and the future around the conflict’s place in modern European history.

Links

• George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia

The Orwell Prize will be at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival for a fifth year, with three panel discussions. To find out more, and to book tickets, click on the links below.

Friday 30th March

• 2pm: Homage to Catalonia: the Spanish Civil War

Saturday 31st March

• 6.30pm: The Road to Wigan Pier: 75 years on

Sunday 1st April

• 4pm: Politics and the press

Links

• Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival
• Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2011: Orwell Prize events (video)
• Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2010: Orwell Prize events (video)
• Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2009: Orwell Prize events (video)
• Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2008: Orwell Prize event (audio)

Full details to follow.

Speaker

• Alan Rusbridger (editor-in-chief, Guardian News and Media)

Details

Organised by the Orwell Trust and Birkbeck College, University of London

The Guardian has been investigating the phone-hacking allegations at the News of the World for years, and broke the story about Milly Dowler’s phone this July. With the Leveson Inquiry and countless police investigations now ongoing, Alan Rusbridger lectures on ‘Hacking away at the truth: an investigation and its consequences’.

Links

• Alan Rusbridger: Hacking Away at the Truth (full text)
• Alan Rusbridger: After Murdoch’s excesses, let us seize the opportunity in the phone hacking inquiry (abridged, The Guardian)
• George Orwell: The Freedom of the Press – proposed preface to Animal Farm (1945, first published TLS, 1972)
• Orwell Lecture 2010: Ferdinand Mount – Orwell and the Oligarchs
• Orwell Lecture 2009: Hilary Mantel – “More like a castle than a realm” – Thomas Cromwell’s Radical England
• Orwell Lecture 2008: Andrew O’Hagan – The English
• George Orwell Memorial Lecture at Birkbeck College

Video

Image from Beacon Radio on flickr (Creative Commons)

Speakers

• Nicolas Kent (artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre)
• Paul Lewis (special projects editor of The Guardian, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2010)
• Mary Riddell (assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2008 and 2004)
• Alex Wheatle (novelist, author of books including Brixton Rock, East of Acre Lane and Brenton Brown)
• Chaired by Jean Seaton (director of the Orwell Prize)

Details

This year’s Orwell Prize launched with a debate on ‘Writing the Riots’, at the Frontline Club, London on Wednesday 9 November. The schedule for the evening is as follows:

• 6.30pm Drinks
• 7pm Launch of the Orwell Prize 2012 and announcement of judges
• 7.05pm Discussion, ‘Writing the Riots’

Entries for this year’s Prize will open on Wednesday 9 November 2011 and close on Wednesday 18 January 2012, for all work published in 2011. The rules are available elsewhere on our website, while the entry forms will become available after the launch on our ‘How to Enter’ page. If you have any queries, please contact gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org.

The schedule for this year’s Prize is:

• 9 November 2011 Launch and launch debate
• 18 January 2012 Close of submissions
• 28 March 2012 Longlist announcement
• 25 April 2012 Shortlist announcement and debate
• 23 May 2012 Awards ceremony, Church House

Links

• How to enter
• Launch 2011: Poverty and the Spending Review
• Launch 2010: What next for Burma?
• Launch 2009: Is journalism failing failing states?
• Launch 2008: Orwell, ID cards, the citizen and the state

Video

Speakers

• Graeme Archer (winner of the Orwell Prize for Blogs 2011)
• Oliver Kamm (The Times, longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Blogs 2009)

Details

Political bloggers like Guido Fawkes or Iain Dale have broken stories and shaped public opinion. But what is the future of the political blogger? Has their power begun to wane? Oliver Kamm and Graeme Archer discuss the future of political blogging.

Links

• Longlist 2011: Discussion on political blogging between David Allen Green (‘Jack of Kent’) and Richard Horton (‘Jack Night’) (video)
• Orwell Prize for Blogs 2011: Longlist
• Orwell Prize for Blogs 2010: Longlist
• Orwell Prize for Blogs 2009: Longlist

Video

Speakers

• Jose Harris (Emeritus Professor of Modern History, University of Oxford)
• Owen Jones (author of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class)
• Shiv Malik (journalist, author of Jilted Generation: How Britain Bankrupted Its Youth)
• Chaired by Julia Wheeler

Details

Public debate about poverty today has seen a return of the Victorian-era distinction between the “undeserving” and “deserving” poor. Jose Harris, Shiv Malik and Owen Jones discuss why society is again debating who deserves state support and who doesn’t.

Links

• George Orwell: Down and Out in Paris and London
• George Orwell: A Clergyman’s Daughter
• George Orwell: The Road to Wigan Pier
• Launch 2011: Poverty and the Spending Review (video)
• Orwell – A Celebration 2009: Coming Up for Air, Unemployment and Uncertainty (video)

Video

The Orwell Prize is delighted to be taking at least two events to The Times’ Cheltenham Literature Festival for the first time. We filmed Peter Davison’s talk on Orwell at the Festival last year, and look forward to taking some of our own events there this year. Click on the events below for more information.

• Cheltenham 2010: Peter Davison – Nightmare in Poland Street

Saturday 15th October

• 10am: Victorian Values

Sunday 16th October

• 6pm: The Political Network

Speakers

• Colette Douglas-Home (journalist)
• Mark Douglas-Home (journalist, former editor of the Glasgow Herald)
• Linda Grant (Orange Prize-winning novelist, books include We Had It So Good)
• Matthew Parris (winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2005)
• Chaired by Dame Janet Smith (chair of the Buxton Festival)

Sadly, Nick Cohen had to pull out

Details

One of George Orwell’s most famous essays, Politics and the English Language, criticises the ‘staleness of imagery’ and ‘lack of precision’, particularly in political writing, where muddled language masks insincerity. ‘If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought’. 65 years on, is it still ‘broadly true that political writing is bad writing’? What corruptions of language have appeared in the age of the internet and breaking news? What can be done to reverse the process?

Links

• George Orwell: Politics and the English Language
• George Orwell: In Front of Your Nose
• Other essays by George Orwell
• Max Dunbar: The Town Crier of the Human Soul (event review)
• Buxton Festival

Video

This year’s awards ceremony will start at 6.30pm (drinks), with the winners being announced from 7pm.The ceremony is being held at Church House, Westminster, which hosted the Houses of Parliament during the Second World War and the first meeting of the UN Security Council.

Entry is free, and everyone is welcome. Please feel free to share the invitation – email gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org to reserve a place on the guestlist.

We look forward to seeing you on the 17th.

• Orwell Prize 2011 winners announced (press release)
• Orwell Prize 2011 winners
• Images from the Awards Ceremony (flickr)
• Church House
• Aleks Krotoski: 1984 photo project (on display at the awards ceremony, flickr)
• Daunt Books (selling books at the awards ceremony)

Videos

Speakers

• Peter Hitchens (winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2010)
• Sunder Katwala (general secretary of the Fabian Society, longlisted for the Blog Prize 2011)
• Iain McLean (official fellow in politics at Nuffield College, professor of politics at the University of Oxford)
• Joan Smith (journalist, author and supporter of Republic)
• Gerry Stoker (professor of politics and governance at the University of Southampton)
• Chaired by Jodie Ginsberg (UK and Ireland bureau chief, Thomson Reuters)
• Shortlist announcement by Jean Seaton (director of the Orwell Prize)

Details

This year’s Orwell Prize shortlists will be announced at Thomson Reuters, Canary Wharf on Tuesday 26th April, ahead of a debate on ‘is it time to make monarchy history?’

There will be drinks from 6.30pm, with this year’s Orwell Prize shortlists – for the Book Prize, Journalism Prize and Blog Prize – being announced at 7pm. The debate will follow the shortlist announcements.

Entry is free, but places are limited, so RSVP to gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org is essential. Please feel free to share the invitation with friends and colleagues.

Shortlist debate image courtesy of www.lydialeith.com.

Links

• Book Prize Longlist 2011
• Journalism Prize Longlist 2011
• Blog Prize Longlist 2011
• SBS Dateline (Australia): Royal Wedding Rebels
• Shortlist Debate 2010: has the political class been fatally weakened? (video)
• Shortlist Debate 2009: are political parties bankrupt? (video)
• Shortlist Debate 2008: has the Left stopped thinking? (video)

Video

Speakers

• Sir Mark Jones (director, Victoria and Albert Museum)
• Karen Freyer (managing director, New Deal of the Mind; former journalist with CNN, Newsnight and TIME)
• Chaired by Jean Seaton (director of the Orwell Prize – Will Gompertz has unfortunately had to pull out)

Details

In Britain the state has always played a large part in funding the arts; in America, private philanthropy has been the main driver. The new government is proposing that philanthropists should play a bigger role in culture in the UK. What effect would this have? What value do the arts bring to society? And does it matter if philanthropists, and not the state, develop them?

Links

• Oxford 2011: Orwell vs Kipling
• George Orwell: Poetry and the microphone (The New Saxon Pamphlet, 1945)

Video

Speakers

• Chaired by Jean Seaton (director of the Orwell Prize)

Orwell:

• Paul Anderson (journalist, author, academic, editor of Orwell in Tribune: “As I Please” and other writings 1943-7)
• Sarah Bakewell (writer, author of the Duff Cooper Prize-winning How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer, Orwell fan)

Kipling:

• Charles Allen (historian, author of Orwell Prize-longlisted Kipling Sahib)
• Andrew Lycett (biographer, author of Rudyard Kipling and editor of Kipling Abroad)

Details

‘Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.’ George Orwell on Rudyard Kipling, 1942

Both Orwell and Kipling (who died 75 years ago, in 1936) were born in India and wrote about the British Empire. Both of them were intensely political writers, across journalism, prose and poetry. But which of them is the greater writer?

Links

• Oxford 2011: Does it make a difference who funds the arts?
• George Orwell: Burmese Days (1934)
• George Orwell: Rudyard Kipling (New English Weekly, 1936)
• George Orwell: Rudyard Kipling (Horizon, 1942)
• Douglas Kerr: Orwell, Kipling and Empire
• Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival

Video

We’re delighted to be taking two events to this year’s Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival (2nd-10th April). It’ll be our fourth year at Oxford – click on the event titles for further details and links to booking information.

Sunday 3rd April

• 4pm: Orwell vs Kipling

Tuesday 5th April

• Noon: Does it make a difference who funds the arts?

Speakers

• David Allen Green (‘Jack of Kent’, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Blogs 2010; judge, Blog Prize 2011)
• Richard Horton (‘Jack Night’, winner of the Orwell Prize for Blogs 2009)
• Jean Seaton (chair, director of the Orwell Prize)

Details

The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce a special event to mark this year’s longlist announcement, in association with the Media Standards Trust and Preiskel & Co. In addition to the announcement of this year’s longlists for the Book Prize, Journalism Prize and Blog Prize, we will be hosting a discussion on blogging with Richard Horton (winner of the Blog Prize 2009 as ‘Jack Night’) and David Allen Green (shortlisted for the Blog Prize 2010 as ‘Jack of Kent’, judge of the Blog Prize 2011), chaired by Jean Seaton (director of the Prize).

The announcement and discussion will start at 7pm, with drinks from 6.30pm.

We are very grateful to Preiskel & Co for hosting this event. Click here for a map of the venue and how to get there.

Links

• Book Prize Entries 2011
• Journalism Prize Entries 2011
• Blog Prize Entries 2011

Video