Novuyo Rosa Tshuma and Diana Evans are on the Orwell Prize 2019 shortlist announced today June 10, 2019.
The Orwell Prizes, named in honour of English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic George Orwell, are the UK’s most prestigious prizes for political writing. The Orwell Foundation annually awards prizes for work which comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’. Starting in 1994, winners of the Orwell Prize were recognised in the categories of political writing and journalism.
In November 2018, the Orwell Foundation launched a new prize, The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, to be awarded for the first time in June 2019. The judges for the new Orwell Prize are chair – broadcaster Tom Sutcliffe, Sam Leith, Literary Editor of The Spectator, Desmond Elliott Prize-winning author Preti Taneja and Dr. Xine Yao, Lecturer at University College London.
The longlist announced on May 7 had 12 works of political fiction including novels by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, Sulaiman Addonia, and Diana Evans. In the shortlist announcement made today Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s House of Stone and Diana Evans for Ordinary People made the cut. Here is the longlist in full with our contemporaries in bold.
- House of Stone, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, Atlantic Fiction
- Ironopolis, Glen James Brown, Parthian Books
- Milkman, Anna Burns, Faber & Faber
- Ordinary People, Diana Evans, Chatto & Windus
- Red Clocks, Leni Zumas, The Borough Press
- Sabrina, Nick Drnaso, Granta
The winner of the prizes worth £3,000 Prize will be announced at the Orwell Prize Ceremony on Tuesday, June 25, 2019, in London, UK.
Leave a Reply