Saturday, March 29, 2008

Orwell prize nominations announced - from The Guardian.

Three Observer journalists and two Independent writers are finalists for this year's Orwell prize for journalism.
The Observer's chief political commentator, Andrew Rawnsley, has been nominated for the Orwell journalism prize, for five columns and his work on the Observer special magazine, the Blair Years, which examined the former prime minister's 10 years in power.
Mary Riddell, now an assistant editor at the Daily Telegraph, is nominated for the same award for six columns she wrote last year while at the Observer.
Observer columnist Nick Cohen was nominated for the Orwell books prize for What's Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way.

Independent columnist Johann Hari is nominated for the Orwell journalism prize for five columns; while his colleague Paul Vallely is up for the same award for six articles for the paper.
The Economist's defence and security editor, Anton La Guardia, is nominated in the same category for six articles.
Veteran presenter Clive James was nominated for the Orwell journalism prize for three editions of A Point of View on BBC Radio 4.

The Orwell prize for political writing is awarded annually to two writers, one for journalism and one for a book, who are judged to have best achieved George Orwell's aim "to make political writing into an art".

A record 54 journalists and 181 books entered this year's awards.
The two Orwell prizes are sponsored by the George Orwell Memorial Fund, which was set up in 1981, and the Political Quarterly, the magazine founded by a group of leftwing thinkers in 1930.

The judges this year were professor Jean Seaton, the chair; Annalena McAfee, the founder of the Guardian's Review section; Albert Scardino, former executive editor of the Guardian and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist; and Sir John Tusa, former head of the BBC World Service.


Other writers shortlisted for the Orwell book prize are Jay Griffiths for Wild: An Elemental Journey; William Hague, for William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner; Ed Husain, for The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left; Marina Lewycka, for Two Caravans; Raja Shehadeh, for Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape; and Clive Stafford Smith, Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons.

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