The Orwell Prize

The longlists for the 2009 Orwell Prize for Political Writing were announced today, and for the first time the award includes a category for bloggers. Along with the traditional Book and Journalism submissions, this year the judges received entries in the form of YouTube videos and Twitter tweets. From eighty-three entrants for the Blog Prize – including the BBC’s Nick Robinson and Justin Webb, the Labour MP for Glasgow South Tom Harris, and The Quindley-Fluff Frontiersman – the judges selected a choice twelve, mixing the professional with the amateur, the politically affiliated with the politically free-wheeling:

Alix Mortimer’s ‘The People’s Republic of Mortimer’; Andrew Sparrow’s Guardian Politics Blog; Chekov’s ‘Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness’; Hopi Sen’s Blog from the back room; Iain Dale’s Diary; Jack Night’s ‘Night Jack’; Mark Easton’s BBC News blog, ‘Mark Easton’s UK’; Neil Robertson’ ‘The Bleeding Heart Show’; Oliver Kamm’s Times Online blog; Paul Mason’s ‘Idle Scrawl’; The Heresiarch’s Heresy Corner; and Tom Harris’s ‘And another thing...’.

While the Books and Journalism prizes have taken as their mantra Orwell’s ambition to ‘make political writing into an art’, the Blog Prize has looked to the day-to-day reflections in Orwell’s diaries for its criteria. The diaries, published as a blog at wordpress.com since August last year, include – along with weather reports and recipes – reflections on the progress of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, and land reform and press freedom in Morocco, where the author was based for much of 1938 and 1939.

Jean Seaton, the Director of the Orwell Prize, said of the longlisted entries that they ‘had to do something distinctive – react immediately to events, take risks, speak to their readers and capture what it means to be at the centre of a story or situation as it evolves. But the best of them do what reporting does – tell us something we need to know, but often with a highly personal voice.’

Meanwhile, the longlists for the Books category includes three authors published by Granta Books: Andrew Brown’s Fishing in Utopia, Eva Figes’ Journey to Nowhere and Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence. Matthew Green, whose Wizard of the Nile is published by Granta’s sibling publisher Portobello, has also made the longlist. Among the longlisted journalists are Martin Bright, Patrick Cockburn and Lindsey Hilsum. The shortlists will be announced on March 25, and the winners at a ceremony on April 22.