Srinivasan, Brown and Waidner shortlisted for Orwell Prizes

Authors including Amia Srinivasan, Natasha Brown and Isabel Waidner have been shortlisted for the Orwell Prizes for Political Writing and Political Fiction.

Nineteen books have been shortlisted for the two book prizes, including nine works of fiction and 10 non-fiction titles.

Srinivasan has made the cut for the political writing list with The Right to Sex (Bloomsbury), her collection of essays examining pornography, consent, desire and sexual status. The book was named Blackwell’s Book of the Year in 2021.

Brown’s Assembly (Hamish Hamilton), a debut that was named Foyles Fiction Book of the Year in 2021, has been shortlisted for the fiction prize, alongside Goldsmiths Prize-winner Isabel Waidner, who is nominated for Sterling Karat Gold (Peninsula Press.)

Granta claims a title on each shortlist with Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit and A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam.

Each prize is worth £3,000 and will be presented to the winner at a ceremony closing the Orwell Festival of Political Writing on 14th July. The finalists will all be invited to take part in the festival, taking place from 22nd June to 14th July. Participants already announced include Solnit, Dominic Cummings, Joshua Yaffa, Ali Smith, with more to be announced in the coming weeks.

Adam Roberts, chair of the judges for the political fiction prize, said: “This is a markedly varied list, something that reflects the diversity and variety at the very top of contemporary writing: from the distilled clarity and precision of Small Things Like These to the stylistic and formal fireworks of Sterling Karat Gold; from the capacious energy and verve of There Are More Things to the sharply focused vignettes of contemporary life of Assembly; from the sharply witty Gaelic tale of island life and colonisation in The Colony and the feminist science fiction of Cwen to Appliance’s Philip-Dickian fantasia on technology and authenticity; from the searching and fluent A Passage North, exploring how the traumas of the past stir the present, to the climate-changed collapsing future of The High House. What all these brilliant novels have in common, and what so impressed the judges, was the various ways they explored the politics of everyday life: personal, racial, linguistic, familial, environmental. They are all, in their ways, political novels, and all, without exception, superb.”

David Edgerton, chair of judges for the political writing prize added: “Each of our shortlisted books changes our minds on something important, and does so compellingly and with a sense of urgency, peering beneath surface appearances, encrusted as they are with apologias, clichés and mendacities. Taking in reportage, essays, historical writing and economics, and ranging from the earliest human cultures to hugely important contemporary problems, they all rise to the challenge of our times, which is not to speak truth to power, but to tell the truth about power.”

The festival is sponsored by Substack, in association with the Institute of Advanced Studies at UCL.

The shortlists in full are:

The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 
Behind Closed Doors by Polly Curtis (Virago)
Spike by Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja (Profile)
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow (Penguin)
My Fourth Time, We Drowned by Sally Hayden (Harper Collins)
Uncommon Wealth by Kojo Karam (John Murray)  
Things I Have Withheld by Kei Miller (Canongate)
Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Granta)
The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Shutdown by Adam Tooze (Viking)
Do Not Disturb by Michela Wrong (Harper Collins/4th Estate)

The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 
Cwen by Alice Albinia (Serpent’s Tail)
A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam (Granta)
Assembly by Natasha Brown (Hamish Hamilton)
The High House by Jessie Greengrass (Swift Press)
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber)
The Colony by Audrey Magee (Faber)
Appliance by J O Morgan (Jonathan Cape)
There Are More Things by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (Fleet)
Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner (Peninsula Press)