Friday 26 November 2010
Full video of our event on Orwell and Russia is now available on our website and YouTube channel. Masha Karp, journalist and translator of a 2001 edition of Animal Farm, and John Lloyd, contributing editor and former Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times and author of Rebirth of a Nation: Anatomy of Russia, talked about Russia’s influence on Orwell and Orwell’s influence in Russia. The discussion took in everything from the difficulties of translation (the Russian versions of Animal Farm all have different titles) to the experience of reading books behind the Iron Curtain, and from Orwell’s experiences in Spain to political attitudes towards Russia today.
Entries OPEN
Entries for this year’s Prize are now open. You can download entry forms for the Book and Journalism Prizes, enter the Blog Prize using the online form, and read the rules and regulations and values of the Prize in full in our ‘How to enter’ section. Entries close on 19th January 2011. Books, journalism and blogs published in 2010, and which have a clear relationship with the UK or Ireland, are eligible. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Orwell Lecture THIS EVENING
There are still some spaces at today’s Orwell Lecture, to be given by Ferdinand Mount (former Orwell Prize judge (2009), former head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, former editor of the Times Literary Supplement and novelist and author). The lecture starts at 5pm, at the Beveridge Hall, Senate House, London. Attendance is free – email events@bbk.ac.uk if you’d like to come along.
From the archive
Patrick Cockburn, winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2009, wrote in The Independent this week that embedded journalism could provide a distorted view of war. We’ve organised a couple of events with frontline journalists: our 2009 launch debate, Is journalism failing failing states?, and one of our events at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2009, on Afghanistan. Alastair Campbell, longlisted for the Book Prize 2008 for The Blair Years, wrote about political memoirs for The Bookseller this week. He and Tony Benn discussed political diaries at our Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival event in 2008.
The Orwell Diaries
Next week, diary entries will be published on 28th November and 1st December. Last week, diary entries were published on 23rd November. If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org or follow us on Twitter. And you can subscribe to this newsletter via email.