The Orwell Foundation has named this year's winners of the Orwell Prizes, recognizing "work which comes closest to George Orwell's ambition 'to make political writing into an art.' " The 2025 book award winners receive £3,000 (about $4,125).
The Orwell Prize for Political Writing was awarded to Looking at Women, Looking at War, an unfinished novel by Victoria Amelina, who was killed in the Ukraine war in 2023. Kim Darroch, chair of judges for the award, said: "Victoria Amelina was a successful Ukrainian novelist, and founder of a book festival, living in the Donetsk region of Eastern Ukraine. The Russian invasion stripped all of this away overnight. Rather than fleeing the country, she travelled it, supporting humanitarian projects, helping others evacuate, researching war crimes, and chronicling the harrowing, sometimes surreal, challenges and experiences of living in a war zone. Then, on June 27, 2023, she was in a pizzeria in Kramatorsk when it was hit by a Russian missile. Sixty-four were injured and thirteen killed. Victoria was among them.
"Her book, Looking at Women, Looking at War, put together after her death by a group of friends and colleagues, is unavoidably fragmentary--a collection of diary entries, interviews, audio files, notes and drafts. But it is all the more powerful for its episodic structure, conjuring up the reality of daily life when mere survival is an achievement. She brings to her narrative the acuity of a journalist and the artistry of a born writer. The result is an unforgettable picture of the human consequences of war."
The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction went to Heart, Be at Peace by Donal Ryan. Jim Crace, chair of judges for the prize, commented: "We have an outstanding shortlist of eight political novels for this year's Orwell Prize for Fiction. All of them are winners. But the single work that has finally emerged as our overall champion is Donal Ryan's Heart, Be at Peace. For its clarity. For its twenty-one perfectly pitched voices. For the neatness and breadth of its form. For its humanity and kindness. Here is a small deprived community in rural Ireland--after the Good Friday Peace Accord and the collapse of the Celtic Tiger--suffering and recovering from the bruises of its political and economic past. The boom years--in both senses of that word--might be over, but in Donal Ryan's exceptional Heart, Be at Peace, the echoes still reverberate and hum."