'Biography' of Nineteen Eighty-Four leads Orwell prize longlist

Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth is among the contenders for the political writing award named after the dystopian classic’s author

Dorian Lynskey’s “biography” of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four has made it on to the longlist for the Orwell prize for political writing.

Set up by the Orwell Foundation, the £3,000 prize is intended to reward those books that best meet Orwell’s ambition “to make political writing into an art”. Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth, which traces the origins of Nineteen Eighty-Four to the time Orwell spent fighting on the republican side in the Spanish civil war, is up against 11 other titles. These include Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman’s exposé The Windrush Betrayal, Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women, about the gender data gap, and the poet Kate Clanchy’s memoir of life as a teacher, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me.

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