Staff

Professor Jean Seaton

Jean Seaton is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster and the Official Historian of the BBC. Jean became Director of The Orwell Foundation (then, The Orwell Prize) in 2007, taking over from Sir Bernard Crick. Under her stewardship the prize has become Britain’s premier prize for political writing, celebrating honest writing and reporting, confronting uncomfortable truths and uncovering hidden voices. She is the author of Carnage and the Media: the Making and Breaking of News about Violence (Penguin, 2005), with James Curran, Power without Responsibility: the Press and Broadcasting in Britain (8^th edition, 2014) and Pinkoes and Traitors: the BBC and the nation, 1974-1987 (2015), serves on the board of the journal The Political Quarterly and is a founding member of several active media NGOs, including Full Fact and the Reuters Institute. She broadcasts regularly on historical, political and cultural matters, including Orwell and his legacy.

Image credit: Bill Knight.

Liz Wallace

Liz Wallace joined The Orwell Foundation from the BBC’s Westminster newsroom, where she had been a Political Reporter and Editor. Before that Liz lived in Paris, beside Orwell’s first lodging in la rue du Pot de Fer. She discovered that the bistros he frequented in Down and Out, ‘where you could be drunk for the equivalent of a shilling’ had raised their prices considerably in the intervening years.

Jeremy Wikeley

Jeremy joined The Orwell Foundation (then The Orwell Prize) and The Orwell Youth Prize as an administrator in 2016, and has since been involved in almost every aspect of the charity’s expanding activities – including launching and editing the Substack serial, Orwell Daily. Also a freelance writer, he finds Orwell’s essays on literature and politics an endless source of inspiration.

James Tookey

James administers The Orwell Prizes for Political Writing and Political Fiction. Outside of the Foundation, he works in publishing. His favourite writing by Orwell can be found in the essays of the 1940s: they are inexhaustibly brilliant.

Sam Taylor Hill

Sam is the Programme Manager for the Orwell Youth Prize and a former winner of the Prize from all the way back in 2015 (thanks to some great teachers). He also lectures in Politics at the University of Bristol, and writes about national identity, class, and ethnicity. Nineteen Eighty-Four was the first book he ever read cover to cover, sparking a lifelong love of sci-fi and fantasy. He credits Orwell’s works for shaping his passion for all things politics too.

Graham Self

Graham supports the Foundation with the administration of its prizes, events, and general office needs. Outside of the Foundation, he works in theatre and production, including with Degenerate Fox, the London Neo-Futurists. As a lifelong animal lover, Graham finds Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant particularly heartrending and feels both Boxer and Mollie were hard done by in Animal Farm.