The Orwell Prize, based at University College London, 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, a third prize was 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".
In 2014, the Youth Orwell Prize was launched, targeted at school years 9 to 13 in order to "support and inspire a new generation of politically engaged young writers" . In 2015, The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain's Social Evils, sponsored and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, was launched.
Bernard Crick founded the prize 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, and A. M. Heath & Company. The Prize was formerly sponsored by the Media Standards Trust. Crick remained Chair of the judges until 2006; since 2007, the media historian Professor Jean Seaton has been the Director of the prize.
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
Nick Cohen – What's Left?
Jay Griffiths – Wild
William Hague – William Wilberforce
Ed Husain – The Islamist
Marina Lewycka – Two Caravans
Clive Stafford Smith – Bad Men
2009
Andrew Brown Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the future that disappeared
Tony Judt – Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century
Owen Matthews – Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War
Hsiao-Hung Pai – Chinese Whispers: The True Story Behind Britain's Hidden Army of Labour
Ahmed Rashid – Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia
Mark Thompson – The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915–1918
2010
Andrea Gillies Keeper
Christopher de Bellaigue – Rebel Land: Among Turkey's Forgotten Peoples
Petina Gappah – An Elegy for Easterly
John Kampfner – Freedom For Sale: How We Made Money and Lost Our Liberty
Kenan Malik – From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy
Michela Wrong – It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle Blower
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
Gavin Knight – Hood Rat
Richard Lloyd Parry – People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman
Siddhartha Deb – The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India
Julia Lovell – The Opium War
2013
A. T. Williams – A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa
Carmen Bugan – Burying the Typewriter
Pankaj Mishra – From the Ruins of the Empire
Clive Stafford Smith – Injustice
Richard Holloway – Leaving Alexandria
Raja Shehadeh – Occupation Diaries
Marie Colvin – On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin
2014
Alan Johnson – This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood
Gaiutra Bahadur – Coolie Woman
Charles Moore – Not for Turning
David Goodhart – The British Dream
Frank Dikötter – The Tragedy of Liberation
James Fergusson – The World's Most Dangerous Place
2015
James Meek – Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else
Rana Dasgupta – Capital: The Eruption of Delhi
Nick Davies – Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch
Dan Davies – In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile
David Kynaston – Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957–1959
Louisa Lim – People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited
2016
Arkady Ostrovsky – The Invention of Russia
Wendell Steavenson – Circling the Square
John Kay – Other People's Money
Jason Burke – The New Threat from Islamic Militancy
Ferdinand Mount – The Tears of the Rajas
Emma Sky – The Unravelling
1994 Neal Ascherson
1995 Paul Foot and Tim Laxton
1996 Melanie Phillips
1997 Ian Bell
1998 Polly Toynbee
1999 Robert Fisk
2000 David McKittrick
2001 David Aaronovitch
2002 Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
2003 Brian Sewell
2004 Vanora Bennett
2005 Matthew Parris
2006 Timothy Garton Ash
2007 Peter Beaumont
2008 Johann Hari (prize revoked in 2011, monetary award not returned)Clive James BBC Radio 4
Anton La Guardia The Economist
Andrew Rawnsley The Observer
Mary Riddell The Observer
Paul Vallely The Independent
2009 Patrick Cockburn
2010 Peter Hitchens
2011 Jenni Russell
2012 Amelia Gentleman – The Guardian
Edward Docx – The Guardian
Daniel Finkelstein – The Times
David James Smith – The Sunday Times
Simon Kuper – Financial Times
Paul Lewis – The Guardian
2013 Andrew Norfolk (The Times) and Tom Bergin (Reuters)
2014 Ghaith Abdul-Ahad – The Guardian
James Astill
Jonathan Freedland
Aditya Chakrabortty
Mary Riddell
AA Gill
Gideon Rachman
2015 Martin Chulov – The Guardian
2016
Oliver Bullough – Various
Iona Craig – Various
David Gardner – International Affairs Editor, Financial Times
Shiraz Maher – The Guardian, New Statesman
Douglas Murray – Standpoint, Spectator
Gideon Rachman – Chief Foreign Affairs Columnist, Financial Times
Louise Tickle – The Guardian, Family Law Journal
2015 Alison Holt Care of the elderly and vulnerable, BBC
2009 Richard Horton: "NightJack– An English Detective" [1]
2010 Winston Smith (pseudonym): "Working with the Underclass" [2]
Hopi Sen – "Hopi Sen" [3]
David Allen Green – "Jack of Kent: A liberal and critical blog mainly about the misuse and misrepresentation of law" [4]
Laurie Penny – "Penny Red" and others [5]
Madam Miaow (pseudonym) – "Madam Miaow says: Of culture, pop-culture and petri dishes" [6]
Tim Marshall – "Foreign Matters"
2011 Graeme Archer: ConservativeHome
2012 Rangers Tax Case
Ms Baroque (pseudonym) – "Baroque in Hackney" [7]
BendyGirl (pseudonym) – "Benefit Scrounging Scum" [8]
Alex Massie – "Alex Massie" [9]
Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi – "Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi" [10]
Wiggy (pseudonym) – "Beneath The Wig" [11]
Lisa Ansell – "Lisa Ansell" [12]
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.
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. 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". 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)". 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.
