From Five Books:
The books shortlisted for the 2026 Orwell Prizes, the UK’s most prestigious awards for writing about politics, have been announced. “As judges, we returned again and again to what George Orwell means to us: clarity of prose and unflinching intellectual bravery,” said Rohan Silva, chair of the judges for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, awarded annually for a nonfiction book. We’ve listed the brilliant books they chose below, from Cold War betrayals and the partition of India to the conflicts still going on in the world today.
The Orwell Prizes are awarded to encourage good writing and thinking about politics, highlighting books which best meet Orwell’s own ambition “to make political writing into an art.” These are the eight books shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2026:
Stalin’s Apostles by Antonia Senior
“Stalin’s Apostles is gripping and superbly written, evoking the times and places its characters inhabit as well as any spy novel. But despite the quality of the writing and the buffoonery of its subjects, Senior has written a serious work of history that takes the Cambridge Five, and their crimes, deeply seriously. She gives due prominence to their many victims, and shows just how important they were to the Soviet domination of Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. This is a book that entirely rewrites a story that many people may think they know.”—Sam Bowman, Political Writing Judge
More here.
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