This year’s Orwell prize for political fiction has been awarded to Pulitzer prize winner Hisham Matar for his novel My Friends (Viking), while this year’s gong for non-fiction political writing went to Matthew Longo for The Picnic: An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain (Bodley Head).
The winners of the Orwell Prizes were announced at Conway Hall in Central London last night, with both authors awarded £3,000.
My Friends by Matar—chosen from a shortlist of eight novels—explores the fallout of the 1984 shootings at the Libyan embassy in London, and its effect on three Libyan friends living in exile in Britain.
Alexandra Harris, who chaired the political fiction panel, said: “My Friends is a work of grace, gentleness, beauty and intellect, offered in the face of blunt violence and tyranny. The shootings at the Libyan embassy in London in 1984 reverberate through the novel, defining the lives of young men who cannot risk return to their families and their native country. Matar’s response to those gunshots is a richly sustained meditation on exile and friendship, love and distance, deepening with each page as layers of recollection and experience accrue.”
Longo’s The Picnic—chosen from a shortlist of nine non-fiction books—explores the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Iron Curtain told through a little known story of the 1989 actions of a group of Hungarian activists who entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain and had a picnic.
Peter Frankopan, the chair of the non-fiction judging panel, said: “It was incredibly difficult to choose a winner from this year’s shortlist which included an unusual number of modern classics—books that will be read for years. Perhaps there were too many fantastic books because we are living through an era of change, and so political non-fiction writing is so resonant; or perhaps we were just unusually lucky.”
The political fiction judging panel is chaired by literary critic and cultural historian Alexandra Harris, novelists Simon Okotie and Ross Raisin, and Lara Choksey, lecturer at the School of English, UCL.
The political writing panel was chaired by the historian Peter Frankopan, who was joined by writer and director of the think tank British Future Sunder Katwala, journalist Christina Lamb, literary critic Lola Seaton, and Rohan Silva, co-founder of Second Home and former senior policy advisor in 10 Downing Street.
