Debut authors Crewe and Apps win Orwell Prizes

Tom Crewe and Peter Apps have won the 2023 Orwell Prizes for political fiction and political writing respectively.

At a ceremony at Conway Hall in London on 22nd June, Crewe received the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction for his debut novel The New Life (Chatto & Windus), and Apps, also a debut author, received the Orwell Prize for Political Writing for Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen (Oneworld).

The New Life takes the struggle to change the law around homosexuality in 1890s Britain as its subject, while Show Me the Bodies details the many failures and decisions which led to the Grenfell Tower fire.

Apps is an award-winning journalist and deputy editor at Inside Housing. He broke a story on the dangers of combustible cladding 34 days before the Grenfell Fire. Crewe was born in Middlesbrough in 1989 and has a PhD in 19th-century British history from the University of Cambridge. Since 2015, he has been an editor at the London Review of Books, to which he contributes essays on politics, art, history and fiction.

The Orwell Prize was first awarded in 1994, making Show Me the Bodies the 30th winner of the prize. They aim to encourage good writing and thinking about politics, with judges asked to find winning entries which meet Orwell’s own ambition “to make political writing into an art". The Political Fiction Prize was first awarded in 2019, and Crewe joins a select group of previous winners made up of Anna Burns, Colson Whitehead, Ali Smith and Claire Keegan.

This year’s judges for the Political Writing prize were: Alice Bell, head of climate and health policy at the Wellcome Trust; Kojo Koram, historian, academic and Orwell Prize 2022 finalist; Martha Lane Fox, businesswoman, philanthropist and peer; Cristina Odone, journalist and editor; and Sukhdev Sandhu, writer and critic.

Boyd Tonkin, journalist, editor and writer who was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal in 2020 for outstanding service to literature over the course of a career, chaired the fiction judging panel, and was joined by Alison Flood, comment and culture editor at the New Scientist; Julia Jordan, associate professor of 20th Century English Literature at UCL and Tomiwa Owolade, contributing editor at the New Statesman.

The judges described Show Me the Bodies as “a magnificent book that deftly combines vivid, compelling accounts of the victims of the fire with forensic (but no less engaging) detail on the decades of politics and policy which led up to it". They added: “Expect to find yourself crying over details of building regulations you never knew existed – and over the fact that so many of us let shifts in such regulations go unnoticed, to such devastating impact. Show Me the Bodies has the values of the Orwell Prize at its core: it is beautiful writing about a devastating subject that we should all understand.”

The New Life  was praised for its “vivid” characters, with Crewe writing about their social, intellectual and erotic lives with “extraordinary verisimilitude". Moreover, they said it was “wonderfully precise about things that themselves do not always seem appropriate to precision” and that “the novel considers the similarities between desire and intellectual life, which both risk producing things that may ultimately prove abortive or bathetic. Crewe stays brilliantly faithful to the language, the outlook and the conventions of 1890s London even as he shows, and investigates, the distance between then and now. With compassion, lucidity and poise he explores both the creation of new sexual identities and the nature of social activism, as the ideals of liberation tangle with shame, fear and doubt,” they said.

Both writers won £3,000.