The Orwell Prize shortlist 2008 has recognised the authors and journalists who have most successfully achieved Orwell’s aim ‘to make political writing into an art”.
A record 181 authors and 54 journalists entered this year.
The winners will be announced at the Foreign Press Association, London, on 24 April.
The shortlist:
Journalism
Johann Hari – The Independent
Clive James – BBC Radio 4
Anton La Guardia – The Economist
Andrew Rawnsley – The Observer
Mary Riddell – The Daily Telegraph
Paul Vallely – The Independent
Books
Nick Cohen, What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way (Fourth Estate)
Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey (Hamish Hamilton)
William Hague, William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner (Harper Press)
Ed Husain, The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left (Penguin)
Marina Lewycka, Two Caravans (Fig Tree)
Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (Profile)
Clive Stafford Smith, Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
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