Category: Long listsTTTT

My name is Hopi Sen. Really.

Escaping a lucrative career in advertising (which ended when I saw a lifetime of Daz adverts stretching before me and resigned in panic) I started work for the Labour party as the Northern region press officer in 2000. After the 2001 election I moved to Party HQ, before becoming the head of campaigns at the Parliamentary Labour Party. I had various stints on by-elections and General Elections- like working as a press officer to the Leader of the party during the 2005 campaign, a job that mostly involved feeding journalists chocolate and offending Quentin Letts.

For six years I was one of those people who are occasionally glimpsed in the background of a photo-op, looking stressed in a cheap suit and in all likelihood sweating profusely. We’re a noble and maligned breed. Now I’ve escaped.

Submitted blogposts

• The triumph of the Tory Eurosceptics.
• Shannon Matthews, Family Breakdown and progressives.
• Fighting Back…
• That Cameron speech in Full
• The iconography of the angry rich man.
• Loving the whip.
• Cameron’s Neo-Hooverism
• 800 years or 42 days?
• Above all, try something.
• A progressive approach to Welfare reform?

Other links

• Hopi Sen
• Hopi Sen, Jo Glanville and Maajid Nawaz, ‘1984: Thoughtcrime’, Orwell Festival 2009

Shortlisted for work published by the New Statesman, Financial Times and Slate.

Michela Wrong has spent 13 years reporting on the African continent. All three of her non-fiction books, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz (about the Congolese dictator Mobutu), I Didn’t Do It for You (about the Red Sea nation of Eritrea) and It’s Our Turn to Eat (about Kenyan whistle-blower John Githongo) have been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.

Submitted articles

• How Kenya lost its way
• Tribal paranoia
• Don’t mention the war
• What made Kibaki blink?
• First Person – Paul Karuri: ‘A Kenyan mob attacked my bus’ (£)
• Who Are the Kikuyu? And why do Kenya’s other tribes resent them so much?

Other links

• Michela Wrong, Lord Ashdown, Peter Beaumont and David Loyn, ‘Is journalism failing failing states?’, Orwell Prize Launch Debate 2009
• Michela Wrong on Journalisted

Paul Vallely writes on social, ethical and religious issues. He is a former executive editor of the Independent on Sunday and of The Sunday Times News Review. He has previously reported from over 30 countries and was the Africa correspondent for The Times. He has written a number of books including Bad Samaritans: First World Ethics and Third World Debt and Promised Lands, a study of land reform in the Philippines, Brazil and Eritrea. He is the editor of The New Politics: Catholic Social Teaching for the 21st Century and A Place of Redemption: a Christian approach to punishment and prison.

Submitted articles

• Karma chameleon: He charms the West, but can the Dalai Lama save Tibet?
• We need more doubt, but I could be wrong
• Religion vs science: can the divide between God and rationality be reconciled?
• Recession – the domino effect
• The right to die: Can there ever be such a thing as a ‘good death’?

Other links

• Paul Vallely’s website
• Paul Vallely on Journalisted

Jonathan Steele is a Guardian columnist, roving foreign correspondent and author. He was The Guardian’s bureau chief in Washington (1975 to 1979) and Moscow (1988 to 1994). In the 80s he reported from southern Africa, central America, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe. In the 90s he covered Kosovo and the Balkans. Since 9/11 he has reported from Afghanistan and Iraq as well as on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He has written several books on international affairs, including books on South Africa, Germany, eastern Europe, Russia and Iraq.

Submitted articles

• Europe’s Obama cheers ring hollow in the Middle East
• Crisis of lies and hysteria
• Only a full inquiry can avert another disaster like Iraq
• It’s over, and Putin won
• This is no sop. It is a vote to end the occupation of Iraq
• The prophets of Iranian regime split won’t find it in the fury of the bazaar

Other links

• Jonathan Steele on Journalisted

Arkady Ostrovsky is the Moscow Bureau Chief for The Economist, and his longlisted entry also includes work from Prospect. He has also written for other publications including the Financial Times, Foreign Policy and the Los Angeles Times.

Submitted articles

• Enigma variations (£)
• The hand that feeds them (£)
• A Caucasian journey (£)
• Put out even more flags (£)
• Mechel bashing (£)
• Flirting with Stalin

Longlisted for work published by the New Statesman.

Lindsey Hilsum is Channel 4 News’ International Editor. She has reported from every continent in the world (apart from Antarctica), and is particularly interested in Iran, Afghanistan and Mexico. She was in Baghdad during the 2003 Iraq war, Belgrade during the NATO Kosovo campaign and has worked extensively in Zimbabwe and the Middle East. She spent two years based in Beijing for the programme.

Lindsey has won numerous awards, including Royal Television Society awards for her reporting from Fallujah, Beslan and with Palestinian refugees.

Before joining the programme she reported for the BBC and The Guardian from Africa and Latin America.

Submitted articles

• What the Chinese don’t know about Africa
• Anger of the ant farmers
• There are other Tibets
• China the aftermath
• Power shifts from the west to the rest
• The patriot games

Other links

• Lindsey Hilsum, Shirong Chen, Richard Dowden, Winston Mano and Stephen Marks, ‘Africa and China’ at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2009
• Lindsey Hilsum at Channel 4 News
• Lindsey Hilsum on Journalisted

Longlisted for work published by the New Statesman and broadcast by Channel 4.

Martin Bright began his journalistic career writing in very simple English for a magazine aimed at French school children. This experience has informed his style ever since. He worked for the BBC World Service, and The Guardian before joining The Observer as Education Correspondent. He went on to become Home Affairs Editor before becoming the New Statesman’s political editor in 2005. He left the New Statesman in January 2009, and started blogging on Spectator.co.uk. He was appointed political editor of the Jewish Chronicle in August 2009.

Submitted articles

• The truth is more tawdry than the lies
• The woman who nearly stopped the war
• British jihad: Why our anti-terror strategy isn’t working
• Why Prudence needs Justice
• We were warned
• Dispatches: The Court of Ken

Other links

• Martin Bright’s blog at Spectator.co.uk
• Martin Bright at New Deal of the Mind
• Martin Bright on Journalisted

When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, many proclaimed the start of a new Elizabethan Age. Few had any inkling, however, of the stupendous changes that would take place over the next 50 years, in Britain and around the world.

In Our Times, A.N. Wilson takes the reader on an exhilarating journey from that day to this. With his acute eye not just for the broad social and cultural sweep but also for the telling detail, he brilliantly distils half a century of unprecedented social and political change.

Here are the defining events and characters of the modern age, from the Suez crisis to Vietnam, The Beatles to Princess Diana, the miners’ strike to the Cold War. Here are the Angry Young Men, the satirists of Beyond the Fringe, Ruth Ellis and the abolition of hanging, the rise of pop culture and celebrity, industrial unrest and the Winter of Discontent, the Thatcher era and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. This book will propel you from post-war austerity – an age of deference in which men wore hats and women wore gloves – through the alterations in our social landscape to the multi-cultural Britain of today. Despite the appalling tyrannies that have taken place in the world, Wilson argues that in the last fifty years Britain has known a period of prosperity and peace without precedent in its history.

With Our Times, A.N. Wilson triumphantly concludes the acclaimed trilogy which includes The Victorians and After the Victorians. It makes compelling reading for anyone interested in the forces that have shaped our world.

• A. N. Wilson on Journalisted

The Refuge and the Fortress deals with British attitudes towards people fleeing racial, religious or political persecution in their own country. Current prejudice against asylum seekers is not new. It echoes much of the rhetoric that greeted Jewish refugees from Tsarist pogroms at the turn of the 20th century, and those escaping Hitler in the 1930s. But this only tells half the story. As well as rejection and hostility, there has always been a characteristically British generosity and kindness towards those who have suffered cruelty and injustice. The book tries to make sense of these conflicting responses. At times, it seems, Britain offers a tale of two countries – the xenophobic and the open-hearted. The aim of the book is to make sense of these apparent contradictions, through direct testimonies of refugees and their descendants over the past 75 years. In doing so, we can also gain an insight into the elusive quality of what it means to be British – a question which is now at the centre of much social and political debate.

• Jeremy Seabrook’s website
• Jeremy Seabrook on Journalisted