Thursday 26 June 2025
Last night, Wednesday 25 June, we revealed the winners of the 2025 Orwell Prizes at the Prize Ceremony in central London, hosted by Lord Ken Macdonald KC.
The winners of the 2025 Orwell Prizes are:
The Orwell Prize for Political Writing
Victoria Amelina – Looking at Women, Looking at War (William Collins)
Kim Darroch, Chair of Judges, the 2025 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, said:
Victoria Amelina was a successful Ukrainian novelist, and founder of a book festival, living in the Donetsk region of Eastern Ukraine. The Russian invasion stripped all of this away overnight. Rather than fleeing the country, she travelled it, supporting humanitarian projects, helping others evacuate, researching war crimes, and chronicling the harrowing, sometimes surreal, challenges and experiences of living in a war zone. Then, on 27 June 2023, she was in a pizzeria in Kramatorsk when it was hit by a Russian missile. Sixty-four were injured and thirteen killed. Victoria was amongst them. Her book, Looking at Women, Looking at War, put together after her death by a group of friends and colleagues, is unavoidably fragmentary – a collection of diary entries, interviews, audio files, notes and drafts. But it is all the more powerful for its episodic structure, conjuring up the reality of daily life when mere survival is an achievement. She brings to her narrative the acuity of a journalist and the artistry of a born writer. The result is an unforgettable picture of the human consequences of war.
Listen to Victoria’s Publisher Arabella Pike and her friend Nataliya Gumenyuk on The World Tonight
The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Donal Ryan – Heart Be at Peace (Doubleday)
Jim Crace, Chair of Judges, the 2025 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, said:
We have an outstanding shortlist of eight political novels for this year’s Orwell Prize for Fiction. All of them are winners. But the single work that has finally emerged as our overall champion is Donal Ryan’s Heart, Be at Peace. For its clarity. For its twenty-one perfectly pitched voices. For the neatness and breadth of its form. For its humanity and kindness. Here is a small deprived community in rural Ireland – after the Good Friday Peace Accord and the collapse of the Celtic Tiger – suffering and recovering from the bruises of its political and economic past. The boom years – in both senses of that word, might be over – but, in Donal Ryan’s exceptional Heart, Be At Peace, the echoes still reverberate and hum.
The Orwell Prize for Journalism
Jenny Kleeman (BBC Radio 4, The Financial Times and The Guardian)
Matt Walsh, Chair of Judges, the 2025 Orwell Prize for Journalism, said:
The hallmark of all of Jenny Kleeman’s reports is her empathetic analysis of people with extraordinary ambitions or in life-changing circumstances. Her writing brings out the humanity of her subjects with emotional intelligence and great sensitivity. Her writing on American pronatalists, or Israelis who want dead soldiers to live on through harvesting their semen, never stooped to cliche or caricature, even when it shocked. Orwell wanted good prose to have purpose and reject humbug, and Kleeman’s writing fits that mould.
The Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness
Simon Murphy – The Mirror
Ligia Teixeira, Chief Executive, Centre for Homelessness Impact, said:
It’s important and commendable that journalism for a large popular audience challenges misconceptions about homelessness, so The Mirror’s reporting of how homelessness impacts women in different ways stood out. Congratulations to Simon Murphy for informing public understanding on the complexities of homelessness.
The 2025 Bernard Crick Prize
The Crick Prize, for the best essay in the Political Quarterly magazine, was also awarded last night to James Hampshire, Professor of Politics in the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex, for his article “‘Full-Fat, Semi-Skimmed or Skimmed?’ The Political Economy of Immigration Policy since Brexit.”
The Crick Prize is named after the British political theorist Sir Bernard Crick, who first founded the Orwell Prize with support from the Political Quarterly. Read an interview with James about his essay on the PQ blog
The Orwell Youth Prize
This year, the winners and runners up in the Orwell Youth Prize also attended the Orwell Prize Ceremony and were awarded their prizes on stage by Richard Blair, George Orwell’s son and the Foundation’s Founding Patron.
Each Youth Prize winner receives a cash prize and a set of George Orwell’s complete works, donated by Penguin. They will also see their work published on the Orwell Foundation website and in the 2025 Orwell Prize anthology.
Find out more.