Vladislav Zubok has produced an extraordinarily comprehensive account of the Cold War from 1945 to its apparent demise in 1991. He manages to incorporate the perspectives of nearly all the many states across the globe that became involved at some time or another. This is a scholarly, well researched book that nevertheless never loses its clear narrative drive.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
Growing up, Edward Wong didn’t hear his father talk much about the older man’s life in China. Perhaps that’s why Wong found himself retracing the elder Wong’s footsteps through the borderlands of the Chinese empire, in his work as the New York Times’s Beijing correspondent. Hong Kong, Harbin, Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia. The lives of the two men weave together to form the thread connecting this grand yet personal account of 70 years of Chinese history.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
War throws into sharp relief what’s important to us. It forces us to decide what we save and what we sacrifice. Simon Parkin takes us to the darkest days of the Nazi siege of Leningrad, where a group of botanists faced a terrible dilemma. Having amassed the world’s greatest seed bank in the hope of ending famine for all humans one day, they now guarded their vast stash of nutritious specimens at the heart of a city that was starving to death. Artfully told, this is a beautiful and harrowing tale of science, politics and principle in times of war.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
The title implies this is a family memoir against a dramatic historical backdrop. It is – and much more. Mishal Husain’s painstaking research allows us to share a view onto the tumult in the Indian sub-continent, before, during and after the end of British colonial rule. The threads of her family’s histories weave with those of Partition. They are as relevant and current as ever and show us what the enduring conflict arising from those times means to human life. It’s painful as well as painstaking. It’s beautiful.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
Gabriel Gatehouse has taken us on a deep dive in the dark and toxic waters of the American conspiracy theory epidemic. Why are the Clintons the target of so much craziness? What lies behind QAnon? Who planned the 6 January assault on the Capitol? It’s all here in this riveting page turner, alongside a cast of characters ranging from the eccentric through the exotic to the downright sinister. The conclusion? You couldn’t make it up. But it’s real, it is doing profound damage to the fabric of America, and sometime soon, the virus will reach our shores.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
Vladimir Putin was mocked for being a bore when he lectured Fox News’s Tucker Carlson about Russian history from the 9th century onwards. But this book proves that the past holds many valuable lessons for the Russia of today, in particular the power of the Orthodox Church for would-be rulers of Russia. Ash deftly recounts a concise and never-boring timeline of the collaboration and competition between the Church and the state throughout the centuries, building up a powerful thesis: under Putin’s Russia, the Church has once again become an arm of the state.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
Anne Applebaum provides a thoroughly documented survey of the way in which autocratic regimes around the world are involved in deep webs of corruption and impunity. She achieves this with a cool analytical tone that never lapses into rage; that leaves much for readers to feel and express themselves.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
This is a memoir about a war not yet ended, which could have undermined its power. Yet from the opening chapter to the close, the power of the image of women looking at war is relentless and necessary. Amelina is setting off for a holiday with her young son as the war comes chasing after her and everyone else in Ukraine. She is finishing a funding application for a literary festival whilst standing in the security queue at the airport, checking her phone for news and “thinking about my new gun and why I, a nearsighted bookworm, decided to buy it”. Thus a beautifully written book, technically unfinished but with a tragic completeness, unfolds.
Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel
A superb account of the build-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 by one of the world’s most astute observers of global affairs. Trofimov explains how the bloodiest war Europe has seen since 1945 broke out, and sets out with admirable clarity what is at stake for Ukraine, as well as for the rest of the world.
Peter Frankopan, Chair of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel 2024
The Achilles Trap is a rigorous, expertly controlled account of what Steve Coll calls the “march to disaster”: the US’s decades-long dealings with Saddam Hussein, characterized by fateful miscalculations and misunderstandings on both sides – a “cascade of errors”, as Coll puts it – and culminating in the catastrophically misjudged American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. A staff writer at the New Yorker and author of several previous books about US involvement in the Middle East, Coll traces the vicissitudes of the US’s relationship with Hussein from his rise to power in 1979 and inauguration of Iraq’s secret nuclear weapons programme, through the precarious collaboration forged with the Reagan administration during the Iraq-Iran war, to the decisive unravelling of relations after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing botched efforts of the CIA to covertly overthrow Hussein. Partly based on 2,000 hours of Hussein’s taped meetings with advisers – which the US discovered during the invasion and some of which Coll accessed by suing the Pentagon – Coll’s intricate, absorbing narrative illuminates the role of political folly, hubris and naivety in a region that continues to be roiled by devastating conflicts.
A sparkling book that is all the more remarkable for being the author’s first. Okundaye is an outstanding guide to what it means to be black and gay in Britain, providing a perspective to the last four decades that is as revelatory as it is important. A marvellous piece of work that makes us think hard about how much we truly know about the country we live in.
Peter Frankopan, Chair of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing panel 2024
Why hasn’t this book been written before? From the first ever breast-feeder, Morgie the Jurassic rodent, to mallard ducks and whether men evolved to rape, and the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, this book has an astonishing range. Reimagining evolution through the female of the species, it’s told with pace, wit and scholarship, and made me laugh, made me gasp, made me angry. I learnt new things on every page.
Christina Lamb, Orwell Prize for Political Writing judge 2024
A powerful, timely and original work of reportage by the Jerusalem-based American journalist Nathan Thrall. It tells the story of a terrible school bus crash in 2012 on a highway outside Jerusalem used predominantly by Palestinians, which was badly maintained and heavily congested thanks to Israeli checkpoints. The accident killed six Palestinian children, including Milad, Abed Salama’s five-year-old son. In plain, vivid prose, Thrall unspools the sequence of events leading up to the crash from multiple perspectives, delving into Abed’s past and into the lives of other parents and family member. Thrall’s careful, historically informed reporting illuminates with distressing clarity the way the Israeli occupation and apartheid system suffuse the intimate lives of Palestinians in the West Bank, leading not only to daily inconveniences, hardships and indignities, but tragedies – accidents that could and should have been avoided.
Lola Seaton, Orwell Prize for Political Writing judge 2024
Can a book about a towering philosopher ever be described as “zippy”? That’s the word that keeps coming back to me when I think about Lyndsey Stonebridge’s compellingly readable book on Hannah Arendt’s life and work. With antisemitism and totalitarianism on the rise in 2024, Arendt’s lucid thinking is as relevant as ever – and We Are Free to Change the World deserves to be read far and wide. (Especially on university campuses.)
Rohan Silva, Orwell Prize for Political Writing judge 2024
In the summer of 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did something unthinkable: they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain – and held a picnic. They were joined by East German holidaymakers in Ladas rolling up for goulash, beer and brass-bands. I did not know this story and I loved the way it surprised me and captured the time, the idealism, and the role of ordinary citizens in the unravelling of the Iron curtain – as well as its echoes for today. Wonderfully told through extensive interviews with everyone from the human rights activist who came up with the madcap idea, the stubborn young woman who made it happen, to Stasi agents and border guards.
Christina Lamb, Orwell Prize for Political Writing judge 2024
The health – or otherwise – of India’s democracy is about as big as political questions get. By telling sprawling stories of some of India’s bravest campaigners and activists, Alpa Shah reveals an awful lot that’s worrying about India today – but also gives us ample reason to believe that a brighter future may lie ahead.
Rohan Silva, Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2024 judge
This powerfully told and meticulously researched and deeply humane testimony of how Daniel Finkelstein’s family history was shaped by the brutality, war and totalitarianism of the Nazi and Communist dictatorships connects the threads of the last century in a way that brings home just how recent its horrors were.
Sunder Katwala, Orwell Prize for Political Writing judge 2024
Around the world, millions of people are quietly caring for long-term unwell, elderly or disabled loved ones; one-in-eight people in the UK and a sixth of the total US population, with comparable proportions across the globe. For many, this is a full-time job, saving our economies billions each year.
Yet when writer, activist and former policy advisor Emily Kenway found herself in the painful position of caring for her mother, she discovered that provision for people in her situation was, at best, hopelessly inadequate and, at worst, completely non-existent. This isn’t only in the form of paltry financial handouts for informal caregivers, but also a dearth of social, psychological, workplace and community structures to support people going through this experience.
Deftly blending memoir, polemic and deeply researched investigation, Who Cares lifts the lid on a subject society has never been willing to confront. Through Emily’s personal story, as well as the voices of other caregivers and those receiving care, unflinching investigations into the facts of care, and research from scientists at the forefront of potential solutions all over the world, this ground-breaking books asks vital questions about why we have a ‘crisis of care’, at both a global level and in the individual lives affected – and shows how we need to reorganise and reimagine the building blocks of our world to ensure caregiving is at its heart.