History of the Orwell Prize

For anyone who grew up as an adolescent with the Orwell oeuvre, winning the prize in his memory is more than a little overwhelming. But for a teacher like me, who always holds up Orwell’s Politics and the English Language as a gold standard for his students, it produced a kind of benign nightmare – because one’s own self too is expected to reach those standards on every page – which is quite impossible.

Peter Hennessy, Winner for Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties, 2007

When George Orwell began, only in the very last years of his life, to make money for the first time, he was generous to hard-up friends, to needy writers, poor poets and to small good causes of the old Left – a habit that his second wife and widow, the late Sonia Orwell, did not continue in quite the same way. Nonetheless, after his death, she said that she tore up between three and five thousand pounds' worth of IOUs.

So when Bernard Crick entered into a contract with her and Secker & Warburg in 1974 to write a life of Orwell, he thought it only right and proper to make an irrevocable grant that year (unknown to her) in trust, via Birkbeck College, of the English hardback volume rights. This money was to help projects by young writers who would have interested Orwell himself had he lived. Just before the book was published in 1980, David Astor agreed to match Bernard Crick’s grant as a tribute to his friend; the George Orwell Memorial Trust’s first trustees were appointed, and additional funds were forthcoming from old friends and admirers and from Richard Blair, Orwell’s adopted son. Among those contributing were the journalist Lord Ardwick (John Bevan), the philosopher Sir Alfred Ayer, historian (and Orwell’s fellow Etonian) Sir Steven Runciman, the writer Julian Symons, The Manchester Evening News, The Observer and Tribune.

The fund at first made small grants for projects from young writers – Arnold Wesker, Alan Plater, and Professors Barbara Hardy, Eric Hobsbawm and Karl Millar were among the early trustees – but projects were hard to evaluate and too many did not appear to result in discernible writing. So after five years, the fund was diverted to endowing an annual memorial lecture, at Birkbeck College and at the University of Sheffield, together with small grants for departmental Orwell occasions. The fund was added to in 1984 through both Blair and Crick contributing half-shares of interview or lecture fees. However, over the years, the lecture fund began to eat into its capital, and the Sheffield lecture and the department grants were discontinued in 2000.

In 1993, Bernard Crick (through his long connection with The Political Quarterly) had negotiated with them a guarantee of additional funding to launch and administer two annual Orwell Prizes for political writing, one for a book and one for journalism. The first prizes were awarded to Neal Ascherson for journalism and to Anatol Lieven for his book, The Baltic Revolution, while the first two annual judges were Barbara Hardy and John Keane (Crick was presiding judge each year until the 2007 Prize).

With the growing reputation of the prize, Reuters in 2004 began to sponsor the prize giving. The prize is now recognised as the 'most prestigious' (BBC Radio 4) and 'most important' (The Observer) British award for political writing.