The shortlists for both prizes will be announced in mid-May and the winners of the prizes, which are both worth £3,000, will be unveiled on George Orwell’s birthday, Tuesday 25th June.
Winning is fast becoming second nature for Nigerian-British writer, Bernadine Evaristo. After bagging a Booker Prize last year, she now has her eyes set on the Orwellian diadem, having now been longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, again for her novel, Girl, Woman, Other.
The longlists for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing were announced on Wednesday 8th April, 2020 by The Orwell Foundation.
The shortlists for both prizes will be announced in mid-May and the winners of the prizes, which are both worth £3,000, will be unveiled on George Orwell’s birthday, Tuesday 25th June.
Evaristo made history last year emerging as a joint winner (with 80-year-old legend, Margaret Atwood) of the 2019 edition of the prestigious Booker Prize, with the same novel, and split the fame and the cash reward of £50,000 prize attached to it.
She became the first black woman ever and the second writer with Nigerian blood flowing through them to have won that literary prize since its creation in 1969, after Ben Okri’s blockbuster novel, The Famished Road (1991), won it 28 years ago.
“The 25 books across the two longlists tell us where we’ve come from, and where we might go. From sweeping works of history to state-of-the-nation novels, via powerful short-story collections and data-driven analyses of gender and surveillance capitalism, the wide range of subjects and concerns on the longlist remain fiercely relevant, portraying the world as it is entering the 2020s, in which a great deal is at stake.
“Above all, they have all been chosen because they live up to Orwell’s stated ambition: ‘to make political writing into an art’,” the Foundation said.
It is the second year the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, sponsored by the Orwell Estate’s literary agents, A. M. Heath, and George Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, has been awarded.
The 2020 longlist of 13 books is dominated by female writers from across four continents. The books are: This Paradise by Ruby Cowling; Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann; Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other; The Wall by John Lanchester; The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner; The Man Who Saw Everything, by Deborah Levy, and Heaven, My Home, by Attica Locke.
Others are To Calais, in Ordinary Time, by James Meek; Girl, by Edna O’Brien; The Travelers, by Regina Porter; Broken Jaw, by Minoli Salgado; Spring, by Ali Smith, and The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead.
The Orwell Foundation uses the work of George Orwell to celebrate honest writing and reporting, uncover hidden lives and confront uncomfortable truths. The Orwell Book Prize was founded in 1994.
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Previous winners have included Anna Burns (Political Fiction 2019) and Patrick Radden Keefe (Political Writing 2019), Darren McGarvey (2018) John Bew (2017), Alan Johnson (2014), and Andrea Gillies (2010).
The 12 books on the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Writing longlist are Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War, by Tim Bouverie; Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, by Kate Clanchy; Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez; The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment, by Amelia Gentleman; Follow Me, Akhi: The Online World of British Muslims, by Hussein Kesvani (Hurst); Maoism: A Global History, by Julia Lovell and The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, by Dorian Lynskey.
Others are Underland: A Deep Time Journey, by Robert Macfarlane; Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS by Azadeh Moaveni; Margaret Thatcher – Herself Alone: The Authorized Biography Vol. 3, by Charles Moore; Kremlin Winter: Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin, by Robert Service, and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff.
The judges for the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction are director of the WOW (Women of the World) Foundation, Jude Kelly (chair); Matthew Sperling, novelist; Sarah Shaffi, literary journalist and editor; and Tom Gatti, deputy editor of the New Statesman.
The judges for the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Writing are head of Bloomberg Economics, Stephanie Flanders (chair); Elif Shafak, novelist; Paul Laity, deputy editor, Guardian Review; and Robert Tombs, Emeritus Professor of French History at Cambridge.
According to the Foundation, the shortlists for both prizes will be announced in mid-May and the winners will be unveiled on George Orwell’s birthday, Tuesday 25th June, together with the winner of The Orwell Prize for Journalism and The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils (longlists for both The Orwell Prize for Journalism and Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils will be announced on Thursday 9th April 2020).
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