Orwell Prize Shortlists Announced

The Orwell Prize shortlists were announced on Wednesday night at an event in London, and Andrew Brown’s Fishing In Utopia – published by Granta Books last year – was among the six titles chosen in the Books category from a longlist of eighteen.

Although born in London, Brown lived in Sweden as a child during the 1960s. He returned to Sweden a decade later, living first on an estate on the edge of Gothenburg and later in a makeshift chalet in the forest, where fishing became an obsession. Fishing in Utopia combines a memoir of his time in the country with an exploration of Sweden’s political and social system, which for a decade or so seemed to have made it a modern progressive utopia, combining a generous welfare system, a liberal attitude to immigration and an industrial economy that prized energy conservation and environmental protection. Sweden was also the subject of the author’s piece ‘In the Clearing’, published in Granta 93: ‘God’s Own Countries'.

The other shortlisted titles in the Books category, judged by Ferdinand Mount and Granta magazine’s former editor Ian Jack, are Tony Judt’s Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, Owen Matthews’ Stalin's Children, Hsiao-Hung Pai’s Chinese Whispers, Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos and Mark Thompson’s The White War.