Wednesday 12 December 2018
The Orwell Foundation is delighted to announce the judges for The Orwell Prize for Journalism and The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils 2019. The Prizes are open for entry and will close 14th January 2019. Journalists may self-nominate, or be nominated by an editor or publicist. Entry is free and there are no charges at any point.
The Orwell Prize for Journalism, worth £3,000 to the winner, will be judged by Tim Marshall (author, Prisoners of Geography), Sam Taylor (Editor, The Lady Magazine) and freelance reporter and founder of The Frontline Club Vaughan Smith. The Orwell Prize for Journalism is for sustained commentary and/or reportage from a journalist working in any medium. Previous winners include Carole Cadwalladr (2017), Gideon Rachman (2016) and Jenni Russell (2011).
The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils – awarded for a story which has enhanced the public understanding of social problems and public policy in the UK – will be judged by Campbell Robb (Chief Executive, JRF), Farrah Storr (Editor, Cosmopolitan), Rosie Millard (Chair, Children in Need and Hull UK City of Culture 2017) and 2018 winner, FT correspondent Sarah O’Connor. The Prize, worth £3,000 to the winner, has been awarded since 2015. Previous winners include writer and campaigner Nicci Gerrard (2016) and Alison Holt (2015).
The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils is supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and named in recognition of the task Joseph Rowntree gave his organization ‘to search out the underlying causes of weakness or evil’ that lay behind Britain’s social problems’. The judges will be looking for quality, sustained investigative journalism and story-telling across a broad range of social issues.
Find out more about the Social Evils prize, including full rules and eligibility, on our website.
The judges of The Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the new Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, supported by the Orwell Estate’s literary agents A. M. Heath and Orwell’s son Richard Blair, will be announced in mid-December.
The Orwell Prizes are Britain’s most prestigious prize for political writing, awarded each year to the books and journalism which come closest to George Orwell’s ambition to ‘make political writing into an art’. With the launch of The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in November 2018, The Orwell Prize for Political Writing is now exclusively open to works of non-fiction.
To assist with your entry: