Orwell Prize

The Orwell Prize is a British prize for political writing of outstanding quality. Three prizes are awarded each year: one for a book, one for journalism and another for blogging. In each case, the winner is the short-listed entry which comes closest to George Orwell's own ambition to 'make political writing into an art'.

The prize was founded by Bernard Crick in 1993 using money from the royalties of the hardback edition of his biography of Orwell. Its sponsors are Orwell's adopted son Richard Blair, Reuters, The Political Quarterly, Blackwell Publishing, Media Standards Trust, and A. M. Heath & Company. Crick remained Chair of the judges until 2006. The media historian Professor Jean Seaton has filled this position since 2007.

In 2008 the winner in the Journalism category was Johann Hari. In July 2011 the Orwell Prize Council decided to revoke Hari's award and withdraw the prize. Public announcement was delayed as Hari was then under investigation by The Independent for professional misconduct. In September 2011 Hari announced that he was returning his prize "as an act of contrition for the errors I made elsewhere, in my interviews", although he "stands by the articles that won the prize". A few weeks later, the Council of the Orwell Prize confirmed that Hari had returned the plaque but not the £2000 prize money, and issued a statement that one of the articles submitted for the prize, "How multiculturalism is betraying women", published by the Independent in April 2007, "contained inaccuracies and conflated different parts of someone else’s story (specifically, a report in Der Spiegel)". In October 2011, the NGO English PEN confirmed that Johann Hari had offered a donation equal to the prize money, in accordance with the wishes of the Orwell Prize trustees.