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) in 2016 following a brief stint working in the office of a member of the Shadow Cabinet. Since then he has been involved in almost every aspect of the charity’s rapidly expanding activities. After a brief career break in 2022, he returned as Communications Manager. Outside of the Foundation he writes poetry and criticism, and particularly enjoys grappling with Orwell’s essays on literature and politics.

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.

Tabitha Hayward

Tabby is the Programme Coordinator for the Orwell Youth Prize and the Youth Programme as a whole. She also runs creative writing workshops for young people and writes poetry, plays and stories. Being from rural Dorset, she appreciates George Bowling’s yearning for the countryside of his childhood in Orwell’s Coming Up For Air, sharing his horror for the ‘Pixie Glen’!

Alice Adonis

As Office Administrator Alice helps out with all the Foundation’s Prizes, while supporting the office in an administrative capacity. She recently finished an MSc in English Language, where she enjoyed researching the history of English in postcolonial countries. Though she thinks Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’ is a work of genius, she remains a stubborn admirer of the ‘not un-’ formation.