Orwell Prize for Political Writing — Complete Winners List

30 years of winners · Orwell Foundation · Since 1994 · ← Back to award page

Year	Title	Author	Publisher
2025	Looking at Women, Looking at War	Victoria Amelina	Pushkin Press
2024	The Picnic: A Journey Through Europe's Forgotten Borderlands	Matthew Longo	W. W. Norton
2023	Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen	Peter Apps	Oneworld
2022	My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World's Deadliest Migration Route	Sally Hayden	Melville House
2021	Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia	Joshua Yaffa	Tim Duggan Books
2020	Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me	Kate Clanchy	Picador
2019	Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland	Patrick Radden Keefe	Doubleday
2018	Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass	Darren McGarvey	Luath Press
2017	Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee	John Bew	Riverrun
2016	The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War	Arkady Ostrovsky	Viking
2015	Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else	James Meek	Verso
2014	This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood	Alan Johnson	—
2013	A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa	A. T. Williams	—
2012	Dead Men Risen	Toby Harnden	—
2011	The Rule of Law	Tom Bingham	—
2010	Keeper	Andrea Gillies	—
2009	Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the future that disappeared	Andrew Brown	—
2008	Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape	Raja Shehadeh	—
2007	Having It So Good: Britain in the 1950s	Peter Hennessy	—
2004	The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century	Robert Cooper	—
2003	Hoo-hahs and Passing Frenzies: Collected Journalism 1991–2000	Francis Wheen	—
2002	Anthony Blunt: His Lives	Miranda Carter	—
2001	Virtual War	Michael Ignatieff	—
2000	The Case of Stephen Lawrence	Brian Cathcart	—
1999	Alexander Solzhenitsyn: a Century in His Life	D. M. Thomas	—
1998	Jennie Lee: A Life	Patricia Hollis	—
1997	Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa	Peter Godwin	—
1996	Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey	Fergal Keane	—
1995	In Search of a State: Catholics in Northern Ireland	Fionnuala O'Connor	—
1994	The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence	Anatol Lieven	—