The Award Tally
FictionNonfiction

The Orwell Prize for Political Writing

The Orwell Foundation

An annual British prize awarded to the book that best achieves George Orwell's ambition 'to make political writing into an art', honoring works of political nonfiction that combine intellectual rigor with compelling prose.

Search through 1,818 books

2026

  1. The Escape From Kabul

    Karen Bartlett

    Won
  2. For the Sun After Long Nights

    Nilo Tabrizy and Fatemeh Jamalpour

    Shortlisted

  3. Israel: What Went Wrong?

    Omer Bartov

    Shortlisted

  4. Shattered Lands

    Sam Dalrymple

    Shortlisted

  5. Stalin's Apostles

    Antonia Senior

    Shortlisted

  6. The Elements of Power

    Nicolas Niarchos

    Shortlisted

  7. The Wall Dancers

    Yi-Ling Liu

    Shortlisted

  8. Three Years on Fire

    Andrey Kurkov

    Shortlisted

2025

  1. Looking at Women, Looking at War

    Victoria Amelina

    Won
  2. At the Edge of Empire

    Edward Wong

    Shortlisted
  3. Autocracy Inc.

    Anne Applebaum

    Shortlisted
  4. Broken Threads

    Mishal Husain

    Shortlisted

  5. The Baton and the Cross

    Lucy Ash

    Shortlisted

  6. The Coming Storm: A Journey into the Heart of the Conspiracy Machine

    Gabriel Gatehouse

    Shortlisted

  7. The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad

    Simon Parkin

    Shortlisted

  8. The World of the Cold War: 1945–1991

    Vladislav Zubok

    Shortlisted

2024

  1. The Picnic

    Matthew Longo

    Won
  2. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story

    Nathan Thrall

    Shortlisted
  3. Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

    Cat Bohannon

    Shortlisted

  4. Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad: A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival

    Daniel Finkelstein

    Shortlisted

  5. Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence

    Yaroslav Trofimov

    Shortlisted

  6. Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain

    Jason Okundaye

    Shortlisted

  7. The Achilles Trap

    Steve Coll

    Shortlisted

  8. The Incarcerations

    Alpa Shah

    Shortlisted

  9. We Are Free to Change the World

    Lyndsey Stonebridge

    Shortlisted

2023

  1. Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen

    Peter Apps

    Won
  2. Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare

    Annabel Sowemimo

    Shortlisted
  3. Fire of the Dragon: China's New Cold War

    Ian Williams

    Shortlisted

  4. Inside Qatar: Hidden Stories from One of the Richest Nations on Earth

    John McManus

    Shortlisted

  5. Invasion: Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival

    Luke Harding

    Shortlisted

  6. The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain's Colonial Legacy

    Philippe Sands

    Shortlisted

  7. The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule

    Angela Saini

    Shortlisted
  8. Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children

    Hannah Barnes

    Shortlisted

  9. Who Cares?: The Hidden Crisis of Caregiving, and How We Solve It

    Emily Kenway

    Shortlisted

2022

  1. My Fourth Time, We Drowned

    Sally Hayden

    Won
  2. Behind Closed Doors

    Polly Curtis

    Shortlisted
  3. Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad

    Michela Wrong

    Shortlisted
  4. Orwell’s Roses

    Rebecca Solnit

    Shortlisted

  5. Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

    Adam Tooze

    Shortlisted

  6. Spike: The Virus vs The People

    Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja

    Shortlisted

  7. The Dawn of Everything

    David Graeber and David Wengrow

    Shortlisted

  8. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

    Amia Srinivasan

    Shortlisted
  9. Things I Have Withheld

    Kei Miller

    Shortlisted

  10. Uncommon Wealth

    Kojo Koram

    Shortlisted

2021

  1. Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition and Compromise in Putin's Russia

    Joshua Yaffa

    Won
  2. African Europeans: An Untold History

    Olivette Otele

    Shortlisted
  3. Eat the Buddha: The Story of Modern Tibet through the People of One Town

    Barbara Demick

    Shortlisted
  4. English Pastoral: An Inheritance

    James Rebanks

    Shortlisted

  5. Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care

    Madeleine Bunting

    Shortlisted
  6. Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women

    Christina Lamb

    Shortlisted

  7. The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery

    Michael Taylor

    Shortlisted

2020

  1. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

    Kate Clanchy

    Won
  2. Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War

    Tim Bouverie

    Shortlisted
  3. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

    Caroline Criado-Perez

    Shortlisted

  4. Margaret Thatcher--Herself Alone: The Authorized Biography Vol. 3

    Charles Moore

    Shortlisted

  5. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

    Shoshana Zuboff

    Shortlisted

  6. The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment

    Amelia Gentleman

    Shortlisted

  7. Underland: A Deep Time Journey

    Robert Macfarlane

    Shortlisted

2019

  1. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

    Patrick Radden Keefe

    Won

  2. Heimat: A German Family Album

    Nora Krug

    Shortlisted

  3. Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back

    Oliver Bullough

    Shortlisted

  4. Nightmarch: Among India's Revolutionary Guerrillas

    Alpa Shah

    Shortlisted

  5. The Growth Delusion: The Wealth and Well-Being of Nations

    David Pilling

    Shortlisted
  6. The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border

    Francisco Cantú

    Shortlisted