2026 Orwell Prize shortlists: From Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands to Chinese digital subcultures

Orwell Prize for Political Writing: the shortlist

Eight works of political writing are on the shortlist. (Generated using AI)

The 2026 judging panel is chaired by entrepreneur Rohan Silva and includes the historian Sir Lawrence Freedman, journalists Jessie Lau and Katie Prescott, and economist Sam Bowman. Their shortlist of eight books, announced in May 2026:

📌 Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov, published by Fern Press, arrives from one of the world’s foremost Holocaust and genocide scholars. The book traces the transformation of Zionism from a movement of Jewish emancipation and liberation into what Bartov describes as a state ideology of ethno-nationalism and the violent domination of Palestinians.  The judges called it “essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” praising its courage in blending the personal with the political, and noting its “nuanced primer on the current crisis.”

📌 The Escape from Kabul by Karen Bartlett, published by Duckworth Books, tells one of the most remarkable stories of female solidarity to emerge from the catastrophe of August 2021. In the 20 years following the American intervention in Afghanistan, women had obtained legal degrees, sat as judges and worked to build modern institutions in a country that had, within their lifetimes, denied them the right to be educated. When Western forces withdrew and the Taliban returned to power, those same women faced mortal danger. Bartlett tells the never-before-told story of how nearly 200 women judges and their families were evacuated, through a network of professional solidarity . The judges described the book as “deeply moving,” praising Bartlett for telling the story “fearlessly” and for confronting “issues of corruption and brutality head on, while weaving in a love and appreciation for the country.”

📌 The Elements of Power by Nicolas Niarchos, published by William Collins, is a work of forensic investigative journalism that follows the global supply chain of the battery metals such as cobalt, lithium, copper, tantalum and others that make electric vehicles and smartphones possible. The book centres on the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the world’s poorest countries and yet one of its most resource-rich, where children descend into dangerous mines with the most basic of tools to dig out materials that power some of the world’s most profitable technology companies. Niarchos extends his gaze to Indonesia and the Western Sahara, building a portrait of a green energy transition built on foundations that its beneficiaries prefer not to examine too closely. The judges praised him for exposing “the abuse of power that goes into” that transition, and for “shining an important light on the trade-off humanity is making” in its rush to electrify.

📌Stalin’s Apostles by Antonia Senior, published by Hodder and Stoughton, draws on recently declassified intelligence files to revisit one of the Cold War’s defining spy stories: the Cambridge Five. Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt were all radicalised at Cambridge University in the 1930s and went on to pass state secrets to the Soviet Union for decades, their treachery responsible directly and indirectly for the deaths of thousands fighting Soviet domination across Eastern Europe. Senior, the judges said, has written a book that “entirely rewrites a story that many people may think they know,” giving due prominence to the victims of the Five rather than to the louche, almost theatrical personalities of the spies themselves.

📌For the Sun After Long Nights by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, published by Atlantic Books, chronicles the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that erupted across Iran in September 2022 following the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in police custody after she was arrested for not wearing her hijab properly. Jamalpour reported from the streets of Tehran at personal risk of imprisonment or death; Tabrizy covered events from New York, knowing that her reporting meant she could not safely return to her country of birth. The book’s dual-narrative structure weaves raw, immediate testimony with meticulous research, and the judges singled out Jamalpour’s on-the-ground work as “exactly the kind of courageous, first-hand journalism George Orwell was renowned for.”

📌Three Years on Fire by Andrey Kurkov, published by Open Borders Press, is the Ukrainian novelist’s chronicle of the third year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of his country. Children near the front wear bulletproof vests to school; soldiers write haiku; a florist killed in battle is remembered across Ukraine through roses planted in his name. The book takes in Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the attempted humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February 2025. The judges called it “moving and compelling,” praising Kurkov for never allowing readers to forget Putin’s responsibility for what Ukraine has endured.

📌 The Wall Dancers by Yi-Ling Liu, published by Bonnier Books, is a work of intimate, years-long reportage on the Chinese internet. Far from being a barren surveillance state, Liu reveals, the Chinese internet has generated its own subcultures, innovations and forms of connection, even as the government tightens its grip on public discourse. The judges praised the book for centring the voices of Chinese people on the ground, and for exploring the consequences of censorship on specific communities such as feminist activism, rather than treating the Chinese public as an undifferentiated mass.

Orwell Prize for Political Fiction: the shortlist

The Orwell Foundation also awards the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. (Generated using AI)

Distinct from the non-fiction prize is the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, which recognises novels and short story collections that are based on major social and political themes.

The 2026 shortlist follows:

📌 This is Where the Serpent Lives by Pakistani-American writer Daniyal Mueenuddin (Bloomsbury), moves between Pakistan’s cities and its feudal countryside, tracing servants, landowners, labourers and their families. The judges called it “evocative and beautifully written,” and said that it has “a suitably Orwellian ending.”

📌Uprising by Tahmima Anam, the Bangladeshi-British novelist, is a story of female resistance rooted in the political geography of the subcontinent. On a remote and sinking island, women who have been bought and sold into servitude discover, through the arrival of one defiant outsider, the possibility of collective rebellion.

The remainder of the fiction shortlist spans the Scottish islands, mid-century Catholic England, post-war Japan, Nigeria and the contemporary United States.

📌John of John by Douglas Stuart, the Booker-winning author of Shuggie Bain, follows a young gay man returning to the Isle of Harris and the collision between his identity and the rigid expectations of his Presbyterian community. The judges called it his best novel yet.

📌 A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia is set in 1950s Rome and London, where a newly ordained priest and a woman are caught in an impossible love affair. Consequently, they are forced to choose between personal integrity and the doctrines of the Church.

📌Every One Still Here, a debut short story collection by Liadan Ní Chuinn, interweaves the political past and present of Ireland with haunting attention to silence and the unsaid.

📌 Flashlight by Susan Choi spans post-war Japan, suburban America and the shadow of North Korea, following a family undone by a father’s mysterious disappearance.

📌The Comfort of Distant Stars by I O Echeruo follows a Nigerian mathematical prodigy haunted by visions of the Igbo sun god as he navigates a new life at Cornell. The novel blends physics and philosophy to ask who gets to define another person’s reality.

📌And Transcription by Ben Lerner is a slender but masterful novel in which a writer arrives to conduct the final interview with his elderly mentor, only to find himself without a recording device and mysteriously unable to admit it.

The Orwell Prize for Political Writing is awarded annually by the Orwell Foundation, a charity based at University College London’s Institute of Advanced Studies, to the work of non-fiction that best meets the spirit of George Orwell’s ambition “to make political writing into an art.”

First established in 1994 by the late Professor Sir Bernard Crick, it is open to any book, pamphlet, diary, memoir or essay collection first published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The prize is named after Eric Arthur Blair, the Eton-educated son of a Bengal civil servant who wrote under the pen name George Orwell. The winner receives between £3,000 and £5,000 (₹385,684 to ₹642,807).

The winners of both the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction will be announced at the Orwell Foundation’s awards ceremony on 25 June 2026.