Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, Sulaiman Addonia, and Diana Evans are on the Orwell Prize 2019 longlist announced today May 7, 2019.
The Orwell Prizes are the UK’s most prestigious prizes for political writing. Every year, The Orwell Foundation awards prizes for the work which comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’. The awards are named in honour of English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic George Orwell.
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 for Political Fiction 2019 are chair – broadcaster Tom Sutcliffe, Sam Leith, Literary Editor of The Spectator, Desmond Elliott Prize winning author Preti Taneja and Dr. Xine Yao, Lecturer in American Literature to 1900 at University College London.
Chair of judges for the Political Fiction Prize, Tom Sutcliffe said: I’m delighted with our long-list for the first Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. It’s a list which acknowledges that the politics in a book can often be found between the lines, rather than on them, and that making your voice heard can sometimes be the most political act of all.
Featuring in the longlist announced are Novuyo Rosa Tshuma for House of Stone, Sulaiman Addonia for Silence is My Mother Tongue, and Diana Evans for Ordinary People. Here is the longlist in full.
- An American Marriage, Tayari Jones, Oneworld
- Brother, David Chariandy, Bloomsbury Publishing
- House of Stone, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, Atlantic Fiction
- In Our Mad and Furious City, Guy Gunaratne, Tinder Press
- Ironopolis, Glen James Brown, Parthian Books
- Milkman, Anna Burns, Faber & Faber
- Ordinary People, Diana Evans, Chatto & Windus
- Perfidious Albion, Sam Byers, Faber & Faber
- Red Clocks, Leni Zumas, The Borough Press
- Sabrina, Nick Drnaso, Granta
- Silence is My Mother Tongue, Sulaiman Addonia, The Indigo Press
- The Ice Migration, Jacqueline Crooks, Pepal Tree Press
Shortlists will be revealed later in the month, with the winner of each £3,000 Prize announced at the Orwell Prize Ceremony on Tuesday 25th June 2019 in London, UK.
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