Archives: Journalism prize entriesTTTT

Arkady Ostrovsky is an award-winning author, journalist and translator. He is Russia and Eastern Europe editor for the Economist and the host of Next Year in Moscow podcast

He has three decades of experience reporting and analysing domestic and foreign affairs in Russia, Ukraine and the former Soviet Union. His cover stories and special reports have helped to shape Western policy and thinking about the region. He joined the Economist in 2007 after 10 years with The Financial Times.

He holds a doctorate degree from Cambridge University in English Literature. His book The Invention of Russia won the 2016 Orwell Prize. His translations of Tom Stoppard’s plays have been staged in Moscow.

His shortlisted pieces are:

• Escape from the meat grinder: the making of a Russian deserter
• A farewell to arms
• Cancel culture in Ukraine

Arkady Ostrovsky’s Escape from the Meat Grinder is beautifully written. It pulls you in and doesn’t let you go.

– Maryam Moshiri, Judge, The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2025

Mark Townsend has reported for the Guardian and its former sister newspaper, the Observer, for almost 25 years, covering many of the world’s major stories. Currently a senior reporter on the Global Development desk, he covers international politics, inequality and human rights. His many accolades include Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards and the Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils.

His shortlisted pieces are:

• Children executed and women raped in front of their families as M23 militia unleashes fresh terror on DRC
• The brutal truth behind Italy’s migrant reduction: beatings and rape by EU-funded and UK-backed forces in Tunisia
• Atrocities mount daily. Promised aid does not arrive. Why has the west turned its back on Sudan?

The emotional impact of Mark’s coverage of the Sudan conflict – where unimaginable brutality is a mundane reality – is amplified by his coolly dispassionate reporting. His documenting of the wilful blindness and hypocrisy of nations and institutions serves as a rebuke to them – and to all of us. Exemplary coverage of an “unfashionable” war

– John Pienaar, Judge, The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2025

Hannah Barnes is an Associate Editor and Writer at the New Statesman, where she focuses on the topics and stories shaping the world we live in. An award-winning journalist, she spent 15 years at the BBC specialising in analytical and investigative journalism on both television – for BBC Newsnight – and radio. Hannah produced, edited and reported a variety of Radio 4’s best known news and current affairs shows. Her book – Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children – is a Sunday Times Bestseller and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.

Her shortlisted pieces are:

• The Trauma Ward
• The Intolerant Age
• How children’s gender care went so wrong

We were struck by the forceful clarity of Hannah Barnes’s writing. Whether using her own experience of trauma in childbirth to shine a light on an under-reported element of becoming a parent, or challenging the growing censoriousness of British public life, Barnes’s writing was purposeful, clear and refreshingly lacking in cliche.

– Matt Walsh, Chair of Judges, The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2025

Dani Garavelli is a freelance journalist, feature writer and occasional broadcaster who works for publications including the London Review of Books, Herald Scotland, Prospect Magazine, The Guardian, The Big Issue and The Bell. She has also made several BBC

Radio 4 documentaries including Scotland’s Uncivil War on rifts within the SNP, and Waiting for the Van on one activist’s attempt to set up a safer drug consumption vehicle.

Her shortlisted pieces are:

• Jailed, Failed, Forgotten
• Election Night in Glasgow
• At the Thistle
• Glasgow’s reinvention has stalled. Can we rekindle it?

Sarah O’Connor is a columnist and associate editor at the Financial Times, where she writes about employment, technology and economics. She first joined the FT in 2007, and she has reported from London, Washington DC and Reykjavik. Her first book, on work and technology, will be published in 2026 by Allen Lane in the UK and Godine in the US.

Her shortlisted pieces are:

• We’re all suffering from qualitynesia now
• Are we becoming a post-literate society?
• Why do people keep buying printers they hate?
• A white-collar world without juniors?

Alexander Clapp is a journalist based in Athens. He writes for the London Review of Books and The Guardian Long Read and has been an Alistair Horne Visiting Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a fellow at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles. His first book, Waste Wars, examines the global trash trade.

His shortlisted pieces are:

• A journey through the world’s newest narco-state
• Turkey said it would become a ‘zero waste’ nation. Instead, it became a dumping ground for Europe’s rubbish
• Rip their skin off’ Alexander Clapp in Montenegro

His writing is exceptional. The prose flows effortlessly. He writes in an artful and clever way. He inserts humour especially in his piece on Ecuador where his black humour gives context, brings place and his characterisation is spot on.

– Maryam Moshiri, Judge, The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2025

Charles Thomson investigates crime and corruption for Newsquest. He is a four-time ‘Weekly Reporter of the Year’ and two-time ‘Crime & Investigative Reporter of the Year’ at the Regional Press Awards.

His years-long investigation into an Essex paedophile ring exposed a notorious child abuser as a secret police informant. Along the way, he became the first UK journalist to obtain deceased offenders’ criminal records under Freedom of Information. The stories won the Ray Fitzwalter Award and were shortlisted for the Paul Foot Award.

His investigation into Jason Moore’s murder conviction unearthed new evidence, now the basis of an appeal bid.

His shortlisted pieces are:

• ‘A sham!’ – What happens when you try to appeal a murder conviction
• Jason Moore – Let The Evidence Speak
• ‘Police who put me here are a disgrace’ – Life prisoner speaks from his cell

Andrew Harding is a BBC foreign correspondent and author. He’s been living and working abroad since 1991, in the former Soviet Union, Asia, and Africa. Andrew has recently reported extensively on the war in Ukraine and on the small boat crisis in the Channel. He’s the author of three acclaimed non-fiction books and is currently based in Paris.

His shortlisted entries are:

• Migrant Deaths
• I Could Not Protect Her
• Hunting Down the People Traffickers

Sophie Elmhirst writes regularly for the Guardian Long Read and the Economist’s 1843 Magazine. She has also written for The New Yorker online, the New York Times, The Gentlewoman, Harper’s Bazaar, The Fence, Tortoise and other publications. Her first book, Maurice and Maralyn – a narrative non-fiction account of a couple shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean in 1973 – was published by Chatto & Windus earlier this year.

Her shortlisted pieces are:

• People are like, Wow!’: the man trying to make condoms sexy
• The last stand of the call centre worker
• Last love: a romance in a care home
• Exposed: The Ashley Madison Hack Episodes 1 & 2

The panel felt Sophie’s approach to telling stories through the intensely moving prism of individual experiences conveyed larger truths. With a range of subjects which touch everyone’s lives, her writing is vibrant and real.

– Janice Gibson, 2024 Orwell Prize for Journalism chair

Nicolas Pelham is the Middle East correspondent for The Economist and its sister publication, 1843 magazine. Postings across the region include Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem and Rabat. He is the author of A New Muslim Order, A History of the Middle East with Peter Mansfield, and Holy Lands which explores the region’s pluralist past. He has consulted for the United Nations on Gaza’s tunnel economy and is a former senior analyst for the International Crisis Group. He speaks Arabic and Hebrew and is struggling with Farsi.

Nicolas’ shortlisted pieces are:

• The mystery of Morocco’s missing king
• The Baghdad job: who was behind history’s biggest bank heist?
• Hamas’s deadly “phantom”: the man behind the attacks

Kavita Puri is a multi award-winning journalist, broadcaster and author. She is the creator and presenter of the series Three Million for BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service. The series producer is Ant Adeane and the editor is Emma Rippon. The podcast pieces together  – for the first time –  one of the darkest periods in our colonial past that took place in the middle of World War Two. Around three million Indians, who were British subjects, died in the 1943 Bengal famine. It’s one of the largest losses of civilian lives on the Allied side but is not remembered with a memorial or even a plaque anywhere in the world today. This complex, and fraught history is told through extraordinary eyewitness and survivor accounts, that have never been broadcast before.

Kavita’s shortlisted pieces are:

• Three Million Episode 1 War
• Three Million Episode 2: The Cigarette Tin
• Three Million episode 3 The f-word
• Three Million episode 4 The Tapes

This podcast on the Bengal Famine feels like a real passion project: Puri has collected voices from the few remaining people alive who remember that time, and skilfully interwoven these interviews with archive interviews. She conjures up a lost world of imperial privilege and terrible decisions, bringing in multiple voices without the narrative ever feeling cluttered.

– Helen Lewis, 2024 Orwell Prize for Journalism judge

James Meek is a novelist and journalist living in London. He is a contributing editor to the London Review of Books. His novel The People’s Act of Love was nominated for the Booker Prize. He was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year in the British Press Awards. His book of essays about privatisation, Private Island, won the Orwell Prize.

James Meek’s shortlisted pieces are:

• ‘That’s my tank on fire’: James Meek watches the video war in Ukraine
  
• Every Field, Every Yard: James Meek reports from Kyiv
  
• Two Armies in One: James Meek on the Russians in Ukraine

James Meek writes forcefully and elegantly, with an exquisite eye for detail. He is a fearless reporter who always finds fresh angles and telling images. His description of the “video war” in Ukraine, for example, approaches this well-covered conflict from a distinctive and illuminating perspective.

– Helen Lewis, 2024 Orwell Prize for Journalism judge

Heidi Blake is a staff writer at The New Yorker, having previously worked as an investigative reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News, The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. She is the author of From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin’s Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin’s Secret War on the West, based on an investigation that was a Pulitzer finalist and won I.R.E.’s Tom Renner Award in 2018. She is also the co-author of The Ugly Game: The Corruption of FIFA and the Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup, drawing on hundreds of millions of documents leaked from inside FIFA.

Her shortlisted pieces are:

• Dubai’s Fugitive Princesses
• Saudi Arabia’s Vanished Princesses
• The U.N. Human-Rights Chief and the Fugitive Princess of Dubai
• “The Runaway Princesses,” Episode 1: Sisters

Daniel De Simone is an investigations correspondent for BBC News, where he researches stories involving injustice, crime, and violent extremism. Recent investigations include the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, which has led to a recently announced official review of the case by an independent police force, and an abusive MI5 agent, a story the government tried to stop by taking the BBC to court. Daniel previously worked as a producer in the BBC’s home affairs team.

His shortlisted pieces are:

• BBC names new suspect in UK’s most notorious racist murder
  
• The new evidence in the UK’s most notorious racist murder
  
• How I found the new suspect 30 years on
  
• Stephen Lawrence suspect said he had killed before in second attack

Antonia Cundy is a special investigations reporter at the Financial Times. Her work exposing abuses of power – from sexual misconduct in the City to modern slavery in the UK fishing industry – have won multiple accolades, including Scoop of the Year at the British Press Awards and Best Investigative News Article at the Anti-Slavery Day Awards.

Cundy was also awarded Young Journalist of the Year at the 2024 Harold Wincott Awards for business, economic and financial journalism, and won New Journalist of the Year at the 2023 British Journalism Awards.

Before joining the FT, Antonia worked as a freelance foreign correspondent. In 2022, she received the Marie Colvin Award for her freelance war reportage from Ukraine and was awarded Newcomer of the Year at the Free Press Awards.

Her shortlisted pieces are:

• Odey investigation
  
• The fishermen, a survival story
  
• The Opus Dei diaries
  

On the face of it, Antonia Cundy’s entries tell three very different stories but they all share a common concern for individuals who suffer at the hands of power, be it a powerful individual, institution or a system. These are deeply reported and deeply affecting stories, beautifully told with clarity and compassion.

– Yuen Chan, 2024 Orwell Prize for Journalism judge