Friday 28 June 2024
Last night, Thursday 27 June, The Orwell Foundation celebrated the finalists and announced the winners of the 2024 Orwell Prizes at the Prize Ceremony in central London, on an evening which also saw Computer Weekly awarded a Special Prize for the magazine’s coverage of the Post Office Horizon scandal over many years. The winners of the 2024 Orwell Prizes are:
The Orwell Prize for Political Writing: Matthew Longo for his book The Picnic: An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain
The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction: Hisham Matar for his novel My Friends
The Orwell Prize for Journalism: Wendell Steavenson for reporting from Ukraine and Israel in The Economist’s 1843 magazine
The Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness: Karl Brown, Debbie Cuthbert, Stuart Potts & David Winter for ‘Unheard Voices‘, with Shelter and On Our Radar
The Orwell Prize, Special Prize: Computer Weekly for breaking the Post Office Horizon scandal and sustained investigation and reportage of the story over many years.
The Crick Prize, for the best essay in the Political Quarterly magazine, was also awarded last night to Robert Saunders for his article ‘How Do We Write the History of Brexit?‘. Orwell Prize winners also receive free subscriptions to PQ, which addresses current issues through serious and thought-provoking articles, written in clear jargon-free English.
All the winning Orwell Prize entries will be featured in The Orwell Prize Anthology 2024, which this year will also feature the judges’ selection of the best unpublished entries submitted to The Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness. The finalists for The Orwell Youth Prize 2024 have been invited to a Celebration Day at University College London on 8 July, where they will take part in a writing workshop with judge John Bernard and share their work with an audience.
About The Orwell Prizes
The Orwell Prizes aim to encourage good writing and thinking about politics, with our independent judges asked to find winning entries which best meet Orwell’s own ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’. In addition to their prizes each winner also received a Folio Society copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four signed by George Orwell’s son Richard Blair, in the 75th anniversary year of the book’s publication.
Since The Orwell Prize was awarded for the first time in 1994 the original categories for books and journalism have been complemented by individual awards showcasing writing and reporting which draws on the full range of Orwell’s contemporary legacy: for Political Fiction, for social reporting and, in 2023, for Reporting Homelessness. Each Prize is worth £3,000 to the winner. Finalists in four categories were announced earlier this year.
The Orwell Foundation is grateful to all the judges, our founding patron Richard Blair, founding sponsors the Political Quarterly, prize sponsors the Centre for Homelessness Impact, partners University College London and A. M. Heath and all our Friends, Patrons and volunteers for making these awards possible. The Orwell Prizes will reopen for entry in November 2024.