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.
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Peter Godwin – Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa
432 pages,
Picador
The award-winning memoir of a white boy growing up in Rhodesia as it went through a bloody transition to majority rule.
Growing up in Rhodesia in the 1960s, Peter Godwin inhabited a magical and frightening world of leopard-hunting, lepers, witch doctors, snakes and forest fires. As an adolescent, a conscript caught in the middle of a vicious civil war, and then as an adult who returned to Zimbabwe as a journalist to cover the bloody transition to majority rule, he discovered a land stalked by death and danger.
Peter Godwin is an award-winning author and journalist. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, after military service he studied law at Cambridge University and international relations and African history at Oxford. He was a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times and a founding presenter and writer of Assignment/Correspondent, BBC television’s premier foreign affairs programme. Mukiwa was an international bestseller and winner of the Orwell Prize for political writing and the Esquire-Apple-Waterstone’s Non-Fiction Award. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, about his return to Zimbabwe as it began to collapse into chaos, is also published by Picador. He lives in New York.