Hisham Matar and Matthew Longo are the winners of this year’s Orwell Prizes, given annually to “work which comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art.’”
Matar was named the winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction for his novel My Friends, which tells the story of a Libyan exile in London who forms a friendship with a writer from his home country. A critic for Kirkus praised the book as “a subtle, graceful, intimate exploration of loss and disconnection.”
In a statement, Simon Okotie, one of the judges for the prize, called the book a “warm and extraordinarily clear-sighted novel that is, in part, about the power of the literary word to effect real-world change.”
Longo won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing for The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain, a nonfiction account of the Pan-European Picnic of 1989, a demonstration on the border of Austria and Hungary that eventually led to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. In a starred review, a Kirkus critic called it a “much-needed reminder of the inexhaustibility of the human quest for personal and collective freedom.”
Judge Christine Lamb said the book is “wonderfully told through extensive interviews with everyone from the human rights activist who came up with the madcap idea, the stubborn young woman who made it happen, to Stasi agents and border guards.”
The Orwell Prizes were established in 1994. Previous winners include Patrick Radden Keefe for Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland and Colson Whitehead for The Nickel Boys.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
