Archives: Journalism prize entriesTTTT

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

Paul Caruana Galizia and Katie Gunning are co-creators of the Tortoise Media podcast series Londongrad. Their reporting explored how Britain’s leaders opened the country’s doors to Russian oligarchs, welcoming not just money but corruption. And how, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has become impossible for them to keep looking away. Londongrad’s findings led to debates in the House of Lords, a vote in the House of Commons, and inquiries by three different select committees.

Their shortlisted pieces are:

• Introducing Londongrad
• Episode one: The advance party
• Episode five: A blind eye
• Episode six: Lord of the spies

Quentin Sommerville is the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent. He has recently been reporting from Eastern Ukraine on the sharpest reality of war, as lived by soldiers and civilians.

His shortlisted pieces are:

• Pinned down by Russian fire in key frontline village
• The making of a young Hero of Ukraine
• Bakhmut: Russian casualties mount but tactics evolve
• Donbas Tank Brigade

Isobel Cockerell is a multimedia investigative journalist. Since October 2018 she has been a reporter for Coda Story, covering disinformation, the war on science and authoritarian technology. She has written and worked as a radio reporter and video journalist covering politics, migration, LGBTQ issues, environmental affairs and culture for platforms such as WIRED, The Daily Beast, the Huffington Post, USA Today, Rappler and Eurasianet. She is the founder and producer of Coda LIVE, a new-format live journalism show bringing stories from all over the world to the stage.

Her shortlisted pieces are:

• The Nazi concentration camps on British soil the UK government tried to forget
• Escaping China’s Surveillance Net
• The Indian migrants lured into forced labor on Mussolini’s farmland
• The Border Industrial Complex

The BBC’s Yogita Limaye along with Imogen Anderson, Sanjay Ganguly and Malik Mudassir Hassan have been unflinching in their commitment to telling the stories of Afghanistan. Operating in a hostile environment for the press, they continue to put a spotlight on Afghanistan’s deteriorating humanitarian situation and the increasing clampdown on women’s freedoms. They have held the Taliban to account on a number of occasions. Their reports also question the accountability of foreign governments, baring the severity of the impact of international sanctions and the freezing of foreign funds, but also covering the plight of those who helped western governments and have been left behind.

Their shortlisted pieces are:

• Afghanistan: ‘I drug my hungry children to sedate them’
• Taliban rule, one year on
• Afghanistan newborn deaths double
• Afghanistan: More restrictions on women’s freedoms

Madeleine Schwartz is a journalist, founder and editor-in-chief of The Dial, a new magazine of international writing. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The Guardian, and The New York Review of Books, where she worked as an editor for several years. Her reporting has been featured on NPR and France 24, and she is a regular commentator on the BBC.

Her shortlisted pieces are:

• ‘You got up and you died’
• Trial’s End
• Teaching in the Banlieue

Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a former deputy editor of the New Statesman, and the author of Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights. She has written for the Guardian, Sunday Times, and New York Times among other publications. Since 2019, she has been on the steering committee for the Reuters Institute for Journalism at Oxford University.

Her shortlisted pieces are:

• The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat
• Gazing Into The Abyss
• White Women’s Tears

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 year, she has been reporting from Ukraine 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:

• The inside story of Chernobyl during the Russian occupation
• Electric shocks, savage dogs and daily beatings: three weeks in Russia as a Ukrainian prisoner-of-war
• The barista-partisan who targeted the Russians in Kherson
• East of Mariupol: what happened to the Ukrainians who fled to Russia?

Sean Morrison is a reporter for the Bristol Cable, specialising in social issues and investigations. The publication of After the Fall concluded a year of original reporting on issues facing council tenants in one of Bristol’s tower blocks, set in the context of a city struggling with an overwhelmed social housing system, for the Bristol Cable’s Life in Lansdowne series.

His shortlisted pieces are:

• After the fall: a death at Lansdowne Court
• Life in Lansdowne: Calls for change from the scene of a tragedy
• Life in Lansdowne: ‘It’s not safe for my boys, but the other options are just as bad’
• Life in Lansdowne: ‘He should have been removed long ago’