Orwell Prize

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For the NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language, see Orwell Award.

The Orwell Prize is a British prize for political writing of outstanding quality. Two prizes are awarded each year: one for a book and one for journalism. Between 2009 and 2012, there was a third prize awarded for blogging. In each case, the winner is the short-listed entry which comes closest to George Orwell's own ambition to 'make political writing into an art'.[1]

The prize was founded by Bernard Crick in 1993 using money from the royalties of the hardback edition of his biography of Orwell. Its sponsors are Orwell's adopted son Richard Blair, The Political Quarterly, Media Standards Trust, and A. M. Heath & Company.[2] Crick remained Chair of the judges until 2006. The media historian Professor Jean Seaton has filled this position since 2007.[3]

In 2008 the winner in the Journalism category was Johann Hari. In July 2011 the Orwell Prize Council decided to revoke Hari's award and withdraw the prize. Public announcement was delayed as Hari was then under investigation by The Independent for professional misconduct.[4] In September 2011 Hari announced that he was returning his prize "as an act of contrition for the errors I made elsewhere, in my interviews", although he "stands by the articles that won the prize".[5] A few weeks later, the Council of the Orwell Prize confirmed that Hari had returned the plaque but not the £2000 prize money, and issued a statement that one of the articles submitted for the prize, "How multiculturalism is betraying women", published by the Independent in April 2007, "contained inaccuracies and conflated different parts of someone else’s story (specifically, a report in Der Spiegel)".[6] In October 2011, the NGO English PEN confirmed that Johann Hari had offered a donation equal to the prize money, in accordance with the wishes of the Orwell Prize trustees.[7]

Winners and shortlists

Book category

  • 1994 Anatol Lieven The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence
  • 1995 Fionnuala O'Connor In Search of a State: Catholics in Northern Ireland
  • 1996 Fergal Keane Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey
  • 1997 Peter Godwin Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa
  • 1998 Patricia Hollis Jennie Lee: A Life
  • 1999 D. M. Thomas Alexander Solzhenitsyn: a Century in His Life
  • 2000 Brian Cathcart The Case of Stephen Lawrence
  • 2001 Michael Ignatieff Virtual War
  • 2002 Miranda Carter Anthony Blunt: His Lives
  • 2003 Francis Wheen Hoo-hahs and Passing Frenzies: Collected Journalism 1991–2000
  • 2004 Robert Cooper The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty First Century
  • 2005 Michael Collins The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class
  • 2006 Delia Jarrett-Macauley Moses, Citizen and Me
  • 2007 Peter Hennessy Having It So Good: Britain in the 1950s
  • 2008 Raja Shehadeh Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape
  • 2009 Andrew Brown Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the future that disappeared
  • 2010 Andrea Gillies Keeper
  • 2011 Tom Bingham The Rule of Law
    • Afsaneh Moqadam – Death to the Dictator!: Witnessing Iran's election and the Crippling of the Islamic Republic
    • Christopher Hitchens – Hitch-22
    • Oliver Bullough – Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys among the defiant people of the Caucasus
    • D. R. Thorpe – Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan
    • Helen Dunmore – The Betrayal
  • 2012 Toby Harnden Dead Men Risen
    • Misha Glenny – DarkMarket: CyberThieves, CyberCops and You (Bodley Head)
    • Gavin Knight – Hood Rat (Picador)
    • Richard Lloyd Parry – People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman (Jonathan Cape)
    • Siddhartha Deb – The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India (Penguin Books)
    • Julia Lovell – The Opium War (Pan Macmillan)
  • 2013 A. T. Williams – A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa (Jonathan Cape)

Journalism category

Blog category

  • 2009 Richard Horton: "NightJack– An English Detective"
  • 2010 Winston Smith (pseudonym): "Working with the Underclass"
    • Hopi Sen – "Hopi Sen"
    • David Allen Green – "Jack of Kent: A liberal and critical blog mainly about the misuse and misrepresentation of law"
    • Laurie Penny – "Penny Red" and others
    • Madam Miaow (pseudonym) – "Madam Miaow says: Of culture, pop-culture and petri dishes"
    • Tim Marshall – "Foreign Matters" [9]
  • 2011 Graeme Archer: ConservativeHome
  • 2012 Rangers Tax Case
    • Ms Baroque (pseudonym) – "Baroque in Hackney"
    • BendyGirl (pseudonym) – "Benefit Scrounging Scum"
    • Alex Massie – "Alex Massie"
    • Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi – "Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi"
    • Wiggy (pseudonym) – "Beneath The Wig"
    • Lisa Ansell – "Lisa Ansell"

Special awards

In 2007, BBC's Newsnight programme was given a special award, the judges noting: "When we were discussing the many very fine pieces of journalism that were submitted Newsnight just spontaneously emerged in our deliberations as the most precious and authoritative home for proper reporting of important stories, beautifully and intelligently crafted by journalists of rare distinction." In 2008, Clive James was given a special award. In 2009, Tony Judt was given a lifetime achievement award. A posthumous award was made to Christopher Hitchens in 2012, his book Arguably having been longlisted that year.[10]

References

  1. ↑ "The award". The Orwell Prize. Retrieved 2013-01-27. 
  2. ↑ "The sponsors". The Orwell Prize. Retrieved 2013-01-27. 
  3. ↑ "A Brief History", Orwell Prize website
  4. ↑ Halliday, Josh (27 September 2011). "Johann Hari faces fresh plagiarism allegations". The Guardian (London). Retrieved 27 September 2011. 
  5. ↑ Hari, Johann (15 September 2011). "Johann Hari: A personal apology". The Independent (London). 
  6. ↑ Gunter, Joel. "Orwell Prize will not pursue Hari over failure to return money". www.journalism.co.uk. www.journalism.co.uk. Retrieved 27 September 2011. 
  7. ↑ {http://www.englishpen.org/news/_1701/}
  8. ↑ Pugh, Andrew (27 September 2011). "Johann Hari yet to return Orwell prize £2,000". Press Gazette. Retrieved 27 September 2011. 
  9. ↑ "Foreign Matters Blog – Foreign policy and affairs, analysis and insights | Sky News Blogs". Blogs.news.sky.com. Retrieved 2012-04-06. 
  10. ↑ "Afghan war book wins Orwell Prize for political writing". BBC News. 23 May 2012. Retrieved 23 May 2012. 

External links

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