The Winner
Orwell is a hero and a model whom we vainly strive to imitate. To be associated with his name, as an Orwell Prize winner, is not just an honour but also a call to action.
Timothy Garton Ash, Journalism Winner, 2006
To see a complete list of winners, click here.
Andrea Gillies – Keeper
256 pages,
Short Books
Can our personalities be taken away from us? Are we more than just the sum of our memories? What exactly is the soul?
Three years ago, Andrea Gillies, a writer and mother of three, took on the care of her mother-in-law Nancy, who was in the middle stages of Alzheimer's disease. This newly extended family moved to a big Victorian house on a headland in the far, far north of Scotland, where the author failed to write a novel and Nancy, her disease accelerated by change, began to move out of the rational world and into dementia's alternative reality.
Keeper is a journal of life in this wild location, in which Gillies tracks Nancy's unravelling grasp on everything that we think of as ordinary, and interweaves her own brilliantly cogent investigations into the way Alzheimer's works. For the family at the centre of this drama, the learning curve was steeper and more interesting than anyone could have imagined.