First-time authors Tom Crewe and Peter Apps have bagged the 2023 Orwell Prizes for their books about politics.
At the ceremony, held at London’s Conway Hall on June 2, Crewe collected the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction for his debut novel The New Life.
Apps, received the Orwell Prize for Political Writing for Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen. Both writers won £3,000.
Crewe’s The New Life is about the fight to change the law around homosexuality in 1890s Britain, while App’s Show Me the Bodies focuses on the litany of failures and decisions, which led to the Grenfell Tower tragedy.
Apps, an award-winning journalist and deputy editor atâ¯Inside Housing, broke a story about the dangers of combustible cladding 34 days before the Grenfell Fire.
An honour, and a joyful surprise, to win the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction last night, among so many great writers. Thank you to the judges, to everyone who has bought a copy so far, and to booksellers everywhere. https://t.co/7bzzEhda8N
— Tom Crewe (@TomCrewe1) June 23, 2023
Crewe, a Cambridge University graduate with a PhD in 19th-century British history, is an editor at the London Review of Books, where his essays on politics, art, history and fiction are often published.
The Orwell Prize was first awarded in 1994, making Apps the show’s 30th winner of the category, which aims to “to make political writing into an art”. Meanwhile, Crewe joins an elite number of recipients, including Anna Burns, Colson Whitehead, Ali Smith and Claire Keegan who have won since The Political Fiction Prize was first awarded in 2019.
This year’s judges for the Political Writing prize included Alice Bell, head of climate and health policy at the Wellcome Trust, Kojo Koram, historian and Orwell Prize 2022 finalist, and Sukhdev Sandhu.
Boyd Tonkin, journalist, who was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal in 2020, headed the fiction judging panel which comprised New Scientist’s culture editor Alison Flood, Julia Jordan, an associate professor of 20th Century English Literature at UCL and New Statesman’s contributing editor, Tomiwa Owolade.
The judges described Show Me the Bodies as “a magnificent book that deftly combines vivid, compelling accounts of the victims of the fire with forensic (but no less engaging) detail on the decades of politics and policy which led up to it". They added: “Expect to find yourself crying over details of building regulations you never knew existed... It is beautiful writing about a devastating subject that we should all understand.”
The New Life⯠was lauded for being “brilliantly faithful to the language, the outlook and the conventions of 1890s London... {Crewe] explores both theâ¯creation of new sexual identities and the nature of social activism, as the ideals of liberation tangle with shame, fear and doubt,” they added.
