# Orwell Prize

The Orwell Prize is a British prize for political writing. The Prize is awarded by The Orwell Foundation, an independent charity (Registered Charity No 1161563, formerly "The Orwell Prize") governed by a board of trustees. Four prizes are awarded each year: one each for a fiction (established 2019) and non-fiction book on politics, one for journalism and one for "Exposing Britain's Social Evils" (established 2015); between 2009 and 2012, a fifth prize was awarded for blogging. In each case, the winner is the short-listed entry which comes closest to George Orwell's own ambition to "make political writing into an art".
In 2014, the Youth Orwell Prize was launched, targeted at school years 9 to 13 in order to "support and inspire a new generation of politically engaged young writers". In 2015, The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain's Social Evils, sponsored and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, was launched.
The British political theorist Sir Bernard Crick founded The Orwell Prize in 1993, using money from the royalties of the hardback edition of his biography of Orwell. Its current sponsors are Orwell's son Richard Blair, The Political Quarterly, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Orwell Estate's literary agents, A. M. Heath. The Prize was formerly sponsored by the Media Standards Trust and Reuters. Bernard Crick remained chair of the judges until 2006; since 2007, the media historian Jean Seaton has been the Director of the Prize. Judging panels for all four prizes are appointed annually.

## Winners and shortlists
### The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction (2019–present)

| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 2019 | Anna Burns | Milkman | Winner |
| 2019 | Glen James Brown | Ironopolis | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Nick Drnaso | Sabrina | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Diana Evans | Ordinary People | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Novuyo Rosa Tshuma | House of Stone | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Leni Zumas | Red Clocks | Shortlist |
| 2020 | Colson Whitehead | The Nickel Boys | Winner |
| 2020 | Lucy Ellmann | Ducks, Newburyport | Shortlist |
| 2020 | Bernardine Evaristo | Girl, Woman, Other | Shortlist |
| 2020 | John Lanchester | The Wall | Shortlist |
| 2020 | Attica Locke | Heaven, My Home | Shortlist |
| 2020 | Edna O'Brien | Girl | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Ali Smith | Summer | Winner |
| 2021 | Abdulrazak Gurnah | Afterlives | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Colum McCann | Apeirogon | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Rumaan Alam | Leave the World Behind | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Akwaeke Emezi | The Death of Vivek Oji | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Brit Bennett | The Vanishing Half | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Claire Keegan | Small Things Like These | Winner |
| 2022 | Alice Albinia | Cwen | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Anuk Arudpragasam | A Passage North | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Natasha Brown | Assembly | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Jessie Greengrass | The High House | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Audrey Magee | The Colony | Shortlist |
| 2022 | J. O. Morgan | Appliance | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Yara Rodrigues Fowler | There Are More Things | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Isabel Waidner | Sterling Karat Gold | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Tom Crewe | The New Life | Winner |
| 2023 | Caleb Azumah Nelson | Small Worlds | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Eleanor Catton | Birnam Wood | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Jonathan Coe | Bournville | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Diana Evans | A House for Alice | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Linda Grant | The Story of the Forest | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Barbara Kingsolver | Demon Copperhead | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Selby Wynn Schwartz | After Sappho | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Hisham Matar | My Friends | Winner |
| 2024 | Merle Collins | Ocean Stirrings | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Percival Everett | James | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Samantha Harvey | Orbital | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Megan Nolan | Ordinary Human Failings | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Andrew O'Hagan | Caledonian Road | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Adam Thirlwell | The Future Future | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Justin Torres | Blackouts | Shortlist |

### The Orwell Prize for Political Writing (2019–present)

| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 2019 | Patrick Radden Keefe | Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland | Winner |
| 2019 | Oliver Bullough | Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Francisco Cantú | The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Nora Krug | Heimat: A German Family Album | Shortlist |
| 2019 | David Pilling | The Growth Delusion: The Wealth and Well-Being of Nations | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Alpa Shah | Nightmarch: Among India's Revolutionary Guerrillas | Shortlist |
| 2020 | Kate Clanchy | Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me | Winner |
| 2020 | Tim Bouverie | Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War | Shortlist |
| 2020 | Caroline Criado Perez | Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men | Shortlist |
| 2020 | Amelia Gentleman | The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment | Shortlist |
| 2020 | Robert Macfarlane | Underland: A Deep Time Journey | Shortlist |
| 2020 | Charles Moore | Margaret Thatcher--Herself Alone: The Authorized Biography Vol. 3 | Shortlist |
| 2020 | Shoshana Zuboff | The Age of Surveillance Capitalism | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Joshua Yaffa | Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition and Compromise in Putin's Russia | Winner |
| 2021 | Madeleine Bunting | Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Barbara Demick | Eat the Buddha: The Story of Modern Tibet through the People of One Town | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Olivette Otele | African Europeans: An Untold History | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Christina Lamb | Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women | Shortlist |
| 2021 | James Rebanks | English Pastoral: An Inheritance | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Michael Taylor | The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Sally Hayden | My Fourth Time, We Drowned | Winner |
| 2022 | Polly Curtis | Behind Closed Doors | Shortlist |
| 2022 | David Graeber and David Wengrow | The Dawn of Everything | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja | Spike: The Virus vs The People | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Kojo Koram | Uncommon Wealth | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Kei Miller | Things I Have Withheld | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Rebecca Solnit | Orwell's Roses | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Amia Srinivasan | The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Adam Tooze | Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Michela Wrong | Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Peter Apps | Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen | Winner |
| 2023 | Hannah Barnes | Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Luke Harding | Invasion: Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Emily Kenway | Who Cares?: The Hidden Crisis of Caregiving, and How We Solve It | Shortlist |
| 2023 | John McManus | Inside Qatar: Hidden Stories from One of the Richest Nations on Earth | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Angela Saini | The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Philippe Sands | The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Annabel Sowemimo | Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Ian Williams | Fire of the Dragon: China's New Cold War | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Matthew Longo | The Picnic | Winner |
| 2024 | Cat Bohannon | Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Steve Coll | The Achilles Trap | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Daniel Finkelstein | Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad: A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Jason Okundaye | Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Alpa Shah | The Incarcerations | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Lyndsey Stonebridge | We Are Free to Change the World | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Nathan Thrall | A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Yaroslav Trofimov | Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence | Shortlist |

### Combined book category (1994–2018)

Beginning with 2019, the Book prize was split into fiction and non-fiction categories.
| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 1994 | Anatol Lieven | The Baltic Revolution: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence | Winner |
| 1995 | Fionnuala O'Connor | In Search of a State: Catholics in Northern Ireland | Winner |
| 1996 | Fergal Keane | Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey | Winner |
| 1997 | Peter Godwin | Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa | Winner |
| 1998 | Patricia Hollis | Jennie Lee: A Life | Winner |
| 1999 | D. M. Thomas | Alexander Solzhenitsyn: a Century in His Life | Winner |
| 2000 | Brian Cathcart | The Case of Stephen Lawrence | Winner |
| 2001 | Michael Ignatieff | Virtual War | Winner |
| 2002 | Miranda Carter | Anthony Blunt: His Lives | Winner |
| 2003 | Francis Wheen | Hoo-hahs and Passing Frenzies: Collected Journalism 1991–2000 | Winner |
| 2003 | Matthew Parris | Chance Witness: An Outsider's Life in Politics | Shortlist |
| 2003 | Iain Sinclair | London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 | Shortlist |
| 2003 | Robert Gildea | Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation 1940-45 | Shortlist |
| 2003 | Richard Weight | Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 | Shortlist |
| 2003 | Neal Ascherson | Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland | Shortlist |
| 2004 | Robert Cooper | The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century | Winner |
| 2004 | Monica Ali | Brick Lane | Shortlist |
| 2004 | John Campbell | Margaret Thatcher: Volume Two: The Iron Lady | Shortlist |
| 2004 | Norman Davies | Rising ’44: The Battle For Warsaw | Shortlist |
| 2004 | Hugo Young | Supping with the Devils: Political Journalism from Thatcher to Blair | Shortlist |
| 2003 | Michael Collins | The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class | Winner |
| 2003 | Timothy Garton Ash | Free World | Shortlist |
| 2003 | Helena Kennedy | Just Law | Shortlist |
| 2003 | Andrew Marr | My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism | Shortlist |
| 2003 | Ian Buruma & Avishai Margalit | Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism | Shortlist |
| 2003 | Juliet Gardiner | Wartime: Britain 1939-1945 | Shortlist |
| 2004 | Delia Jarrett-Macauley | Moses, Citizen and Me | Winner |
| 2004 | Bernard Hare | Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew | Shortlist |
| 2004 | Richard Webster | The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt | Shortlist |
| 2004 | Michela Wrong | I Didn't Do It For You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation | Shortlist |
| 2004 | David Loyn | Frontline: The True Story of the British Mavericks Who Changed the Face of War Reporting | Shortlist |
| 2004 | Ekow Eshun | Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa | Shortlist |
| 2007 | Peter Hennessy | Having It So Good: Britain in the 1950s | Winner |
| 2007 | Simon Jenkins | Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts | Shortlist |
| 2007 | Rory Stewart | Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq | Shortlist |
| 2007 | Lewis Page | Lions, Donkeys And Dinosaurs: Waste and Blundering in the Military | Shortlist |
| 2007 | Carmen Callil | Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland | Shortlist |
| 2007 | Hugh Brogan | Alexis de Tocqueville: Prophet of Democracy in the Age of Revolution | Shortlist |
| 2008 | Raja Shehadeh | Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape | Winner |
| 2008 | Nick Cohen | What's Left? | Shortlist |
| 2008 | Jay Griffiths | Wild | Shortlist |
| 2008 | William Hague | William Wilberforce | Shortlist |
| 2008 | Ed Husain | The Islamist | Shortlist |
| 2008 | Marina Lewycka | Two Caravans | Shortlist |
| 2008 | Clive Stafford Smith | Bad Men | Shortlist |
| 2009 | Andrew Brown | Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the future that disappeared | Winner |
| 2009 | Tony Judt | Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century | Shortlist |
| 2009 | Owen Matthews | Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War | Shortlist |
| 2009 | Hsiao-Hung Pai | Chinese Whispers: The True Story Behind Britain's Hidden Army of Labour | Shortlist |
| 2009 | Ahmed Rashid | Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia | Shortlist |
| 2009 | Mark Thompson | The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915–1918 | Shortlist |
| 2010 | Andrea Gillies | Keeper | Winner |
| 2010 | Christopher de Bellaigue | Rebel Land: Among Turkey's Forgotten Peoples | Shortlist |
| 2010 | Petina Gappah | An Elegy for Easterly | Shortlist |
| 2010 | John Kampfner | Freedom For Sale: How We Made Money and Lost Our Liberty | Shortlist |
| 2010 | Kenan Malik | From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy | Shortlist |
| 2010 | Michela Wrong | t's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle Blower | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Tom Bingham | The Rule of Law | Winner |
| 2011 | Afsaneh Moqadam | Death to the Dictator!: Witnessing Iran's election and the Crippling of the Islamic Republic | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Christopher Hitchens | Hitch-22 | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Oliver Bullough | Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys among the defiant people of the Caucasus | Shortlist |
| 2011 | D. R. Thorpe | Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Helen Dunmore | The Betrayal | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Toby Harnden | Dead Men Risen | Winner |
| 2012 | Misha Glenny | DarkMarket: CyberThieves, CyberCops and You | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Gavin Knight | Hood Rat | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Richard Lloyd Parry | People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Siddhartha Deb | The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Julia Lovell | The Opium War | Shortlist |
| 2013 | A. T. Williams | A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa | Winner |
| 2013 | Carmen Bugan | Burying the Typewriter | Shortlist |
| 2013 | Pankaj Mishra | From the Ruins of the Empire | Shortlist |
| 2013 | Clive Stafford Smith | Injustice | Shortlist |
| 2013 | Richard Holloway | Leaving Alexandria | Shortlist |
| 2013 | Raja Shehadeh | Occupation Diaries | Shortlist |
| 2013 | Marie Colvin | On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin | Shortlist |
| 2014 | Alan Johnson | This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood | Winner |
| 2014 | Gaiutra Bahadur | Coolie Woman | Shortlist |
| 2014 | Charles Moore | Not for Turning | Shortlist |
| 2014 | David Goodhart | The British Dream | Shortlist |
| 2014 | Frank Dikötter | The Tragedy of Liberation | Shortlist |
| 2014 | James Fergusson | The World's Most Dangerous Place | Shortlist |
| 2015 | James Meek | Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else | Winner |
| 2015 | Rana Dasgupta | Capital: The Eruption of Delhi | Shortlist |
| 2015 | Nick Davies | Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch | Shortlist |
| 2015 | Dan Davies | In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile | Shortlist |
| 2015 | David Kynaston | Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957–1959 | Shortlist |
| 2015 | Louisa Lim | People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Arkady Ostrovsky | The Invention of Russia | Winner |
| 2016 | Wendell Steavenson | Circling the Square | Shortlist |
| 2016 | John Kay | Other People's Money | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Jason Burke | The New Threat from Islamic Militancy | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Ferdinand Mount | The Tears of the Rajas | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Emma Sky | The Unravelling | Shortlist |
| 2017 | John Bew | Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee | Winner |
| 2017 | Ruth Dudley Edwards | The Seven: The Lives and Legacies of the Founding Fathers of the Irish Republic | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Tim Shipman | All Out War: The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain's Political Class | Shortlist |
| 2017 | J. D. Taylor | Island Story: Journeys Around Unfamiliar Britain | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Adrian Tempany | And the Sun Shines Now: How Hillsborough and the Premier League Changed Britain | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Gary Younge | Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Darren McGarvey | Poverty Safari | Winner |
| 2018 | Christopher de Bellaigue | The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Cordelia Fine | Testosterone Rex | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Mark Mazower | What You Did Not Tell | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Ali Smith | Winter | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Clair Wills | Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain | Shortlist |

### The Orwell Prize for Journalism (1994–present )

| Year | Recipients | Result |
| 1994 | Neal Ascherson | Winner |
| 1995 | Paul Foot | Winner |
| 1995 | Tim Laxton | Winner |
| 1996 | Melanie Phillips | Winner |
| 1997 | Ian Bell | Winner |
| 1998 | Polly Toynbee | Winner |
| 1999 | Robert Fisk | Winner |
| 2000 | David McKittrick | Winner |
| 2001 | David Aaronovitch | Winner |
| 2002 | Yasmin Alibhai-Brown | Winner |
| 2003 | Brian Sewell | Winner |
| 2004 | Vanora Bennett | Winner |
| 2005 | Matthew Parris | Winner |
| 2006 | Timothy Garton Ash | Winner |
| 2006 | Steve Richards | Shortlist |
| 2006 | Oliver Burkeman | Shortlist |
| 2006 | Lesley Riddoch | Shortlist |
| 2006 | Jonathan Freedland | Shortlist |
| 2006 | Bronwen Maddox | Shortlist |
| 2007 | Peter Beaumont | Winner |
| 2007 | John Rentoul | Shortlist |
| 2007 | Martin Bright | Shortlist |
| 2007 | Peter Hitchens | Shortlist |
| 2008 | Johann Hari (revoked in 2011) | Winner |
| 2008 | Clive James | Shortlist |
| 2008 | Anton La Guardia | Shortlist |
| 2008 | Andrew Rawnsley | Shortlist |
| 2008 | Mary Riddell | Shortlist |
| 2008 | Paul Vallely | Shortlist |
| 2009 | Patrick Cockburn | Winner |
| 2009 | Peter Oborne | Shortlist |
| 2009 | Peter Hitchens | Shortlist |
| 2009 | Henry Porter | Shortlist |
| 2009 | Donald Macintyre | Shortlist |
| 2009 | Catherine Bennett | Shortlist |
| 2010 | Peter Hitchens | Winner |
| 2010 | Paul Lewis | Shortlist |
| 2010 | John Arlidge | Shortlist |
| 2010 | Hamish McRae | Shortlist |
| 2010 | David Reynolds | Shortlist |
| 2010 | Anthony Loyd | Shortlist |
| 2010 | Amelia Gentleman | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Jenni Russell | Winner |
| 2011 | Rachel Shabi | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Philip Collins | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Gideon Rachman | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Declan Walsh | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Catherine Mayer | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Amelia Gentleman | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Amelia Gentleman | Winner |
| 2012 | Edward Docx | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Daniel Finkelstein | Shortlist |
| 2012 | David James Smith | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Simon Kuper | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Paul Lewis | Shortlist |
| 2013 | Andrew Norfolk | Winner |
| 2013 | Tom Bergin | Winner |
| 2013 | Kim Sengupta | Shortlist |
| 2013 | Jamil Anderlini | Shortlist |
| 2013 | Ian Cobain | Shortlist |
| 2013 | Christina Patterson | Shortlist |
| 2014 | Ghaith Abdul-Ahad | Winner |
| 2014 | James Astill | Shortlist |
| 2014 | Jonathan Freedland | Shortlist |
| 2014 | Aditya Chakrabortty | Shortlist |
| 2014 | Mary Riddell | Shortlist |
| 2014 | AA Gill | Shortlist |
| 2014 | Gideon Rachman | Shortlist |
| 2015 | Martin Chulov | Winner |
| 2015 | Rosie Blau | Shortlist |
| 2015 | Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi | Shortlist |
| 2015 | Peter Ross | Shortlist |
| 2015 | Mary Riddell | Shortlist |
| 2015 | Kim Sengupta | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Iona Craig | Winner |
| 2016 | Gideon Rachman | Winner |
| 2016 | Douglas Murray | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Oliver Bullough | Shortlist |
| 2016 | David Gardner | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Shiraz Maher | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Louise Tickle | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Fintan O'Toole | Winner |
| 2017 | Rosie Blau | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Carole Cadwalladr | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Aditya Chakrabortty | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Nick Cohen | Shortlist |
| 2017 | John Harris | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Paul Wood | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Carole Cadwalladr | Winner |
| 2018 | Edward Carr | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Sam Knight | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Anthony Loyd | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Jack Shenker | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Janice Turner | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Suzanne Moore | Winner |
| 2019 | Steve Bloomfield | Winner |
| 2020 | Janice Turner | Winner |
| 2020 | John Harris and John Domokos | Nominee |
| 2021 | John Harris and John Domokos | Winner |
| 2021 | George Arbuthnott and Jonathan Calvert | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Chloe Hadjimatheou | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Sarah O'Connor | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Megha Rajagopalan and Alison Killing | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Gary Younge | Shortlist |
| 2022 | George Monbiot | Winner |
| 2022 | Ali Fowle, Aun Qi Koh, and Drew Ambrose | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Billy Perrigo | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Daniel Trilling | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Gabriel Gatehouse and Lucy Proctor | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Gary Younge | Winner |
| 2023 | Paul Caruana Galizia & Katie Gunning | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Isobel Cockerell | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Helen Lewis | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Yogita Limaye with Imogen Anderson, Sanjay Ganguly and Malik Mudassir Hassan | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Sean Morrison | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Madeleine Schwartz | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Quentin Sommerville | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Wendell Steavenson | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Wendell Steavenson | Winner |
| 2024 | Heidi Blake | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Antonia Cundy | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Sophie Elmherst | Shortlist |
| 2024 | James Meek | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Nicolas Pelham | Shortlist |
| 2024 | David Pilling | Shortlist |
| 2024 | Kavita Puri | Shortlist |
| 2024 | David de Simone | Shortlist |

### The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain's Social Evils (2015–present)

| Year | Author | Title | Publisher | Result |
| 2015 | Alison Holt | Care of the elderly and vulnerable | BBC | Winner |
| 2015 | Randeep Ramesh | Casino, style Gambling as a Social Ill | | Shortlist |
| 2015 | Nick Mathiason | A Great British Housing Crisis | | Shortlist |
| 2015 | Mark Townsend | Serco: a hunt for the truth inside Yarl's Wood | | Shortlist |
| 2015 | George Arbuthnott | Slaves in peril on the sea | | Shortlist |
| 2015 | Aditya Chakrabortty | London Housing Crisis | | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Nicci Gerrard | Words fail us: Dementia and the arts | | Winner |
| 2016 | Sally Gainsbury, Sarah Neville, and John Burn-Murdoch | The Austerity State | Financial Times | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Jackie Long, Job Rabkin, and Lee Sorrell | Detention Undercover: Inside Yarl's Wood | Channel 4 | Shortlist |
| 2016 | Michael Buchanan | Investigation into NHS Failings | | Shortlist |
| 2016 | David Cohen, Matt Writtle, and Kiran Mensah | The Estate We're In | Evening Standard | Shortlist |
| 2016 | David Leigh, James Ball, Juliette Garside, and David Pegg | The HSBC Files | The Guardian | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Felicity Lawrence | The gangsters on England's doorstep | The Guardian | Winner |
| 2017 | Billy Kenber | Drug profiteering exposed | The Times | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Tom Warren, Jane Bradley, and Richard Holmes | The RBS Dash for Cash | BuzzFeed News | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Ros Wynne-Jones | Real Britain | Daily Mirror | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Mark Townsend | From Brighton the Battlefield | The Guardian | Shortlist |
| 2017 | Anna Hall, Erica Gornal, and Louise Tickle | Behind Closed Doors | True Vision Aire and The Guardian | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Sarah O’Connor, John Burn-Murdoch, and Christopher Nunn | On the Edge | Financial Times | Winner |
| 2018 | Andy Davies, Anja Popp, and Dai Bakera | Her Name Was Lindy | Channel 4 News | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Joe Plomin | Behind Locked Doors | BBC Panorama | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Patrick Strudwick | This Man Had His Leg Broken in Four Places Because He Is Gay | BuzzFeed UK | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Mark Townsend | Four young black men die: were they killed by the police? | The Observer | Shortlist |
| 2018 | Jennifer Williams | Spice | Manchester Evening News | Shortlist |
| 2019 | Max Daly | Behind County Lines | Vice | Winner |
| 2020 | Ian Birrell | | | Winner |
| 2021 | Annabel Deas | Hope High | BBC Radio 5 Live | Winner |
| 2021 | Robert Wright | Behind Closed Doors: Modern Slavery in Kensington | The Financial Times | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Sirin Kale | Lost to the Virus | The Guardian | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Simon Akam | Britain and the Pandemic | 1843 | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Tom Kelly, Susie Coen, and Sophie Borland | Exposing the Care Homes Catastrophe | Mail Investigation Team | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Jane Bradley and Amanda Taub | Failings in Britain Leave Victims of Domestic Violence in Peril | The New York Times | Shortlist |
| 2021 | Richard Watson | Hate Crime | BBC Newsnight | Shortlist |
| 2022 | Ed Thomas | The Cost of Covid - Burnley Crisis | BBC News | Winner |
| 2023 | Shanti Das | Migrant care workers | The Observer | Winner |
| 2023 | Mark Townsend | Child asylum seekers | The Observer | Winner |

### The Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness (2023–present)

| Year | Author | Result |
| 2023 | Freya Marshall Payne | Winner |
| 2023 | Daniel Lavelle | Winner |
| 2023 | Carolyn Atkinson | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Lucy Campbell | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Daniel Hewitt | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Zohra Naciri | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Jack Simpson | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Vicky Spratt | Shortlist |
| 2023 | Daniel Trilling | Shortlist |

### Blog category (2009–2012)

| Year | Author | Title | Result |
| 2009 | Richard Horton | NightJack: An English Detective | Winner |
| 2009 | Iain Dale | | Shortlist |
| 2009 | Paul Mason | | Shortlist |
| 2009 | Alix Mortimer | | Shortlist |
| 2009 | Owen Polley | | Shortlist |
| 2009 | Andrew Sparrow | | Shortlist |
| 2010 | Winston Smith (pseudonym) | Working with the Underclass | Winner |
| 2010 | David Allen Green | Jack of Kent | Shortlist |
| 2010 | Tim Marshall | Foreign Matters | Shortlist |
| 2010 | Madam Miaow (pseudonym) | Madam Miaow says: Of culture, pop-culture and petri dishes | Shortlist |
| 2010 | Laurie Penny | Penny Red and others | Shortlist |
| 2010 | Hopi Sen | Hopi Sen | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Graeme Archer | | Winner |
| 2011 | Molly Bennett | | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Cath Elliott | | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Daniel Hannan | | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Nelson Jones | | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Paul Mason | | Shortlist |
| 2011 | Duncan McLaren (author) | | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Rangers Tax Case | | Winner |
| 2012 | Lisa Ansell | Lisa Ansell | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Ms Baroque (pseudonym) | Baroque in Hackney | Shortlist |
| 2012 | BendyGirl (pseudonym) | Benefit Scrounging Scum | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Alex Massie | Alex Massie | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi | Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi | Shortlist |
| 2012 | Wiggy (pseudonym) | Beneath The Wig | Shortlist |

## Special prizes

In addition to the four regular prizes, the judges may choose to award a special prize.
In 2007, BBC's Newsnight programme was given a special prize, the judges noting, "When we were discussing the many very fine pieces of journalism that were submitted Newsnight just spontaneously emerged in our deliberations as the most precious and authoritative home for proper reporting of important stories, beautifully and intelligently crafted by journalists of rare distinction."
In 2008, Clive James was given a special award.
In 2009, Tony Judt was given a lifetime achievement award.
In 2012, a posthumous award was made to Christopher Hitchens, his book Arguably having been longlisted that year.
In 2013, Marie Colvin received a special prize for On the Front Line. She had been killed earlier that year while on assignment in Homs, Syria.
In 2014, the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland was given a special award, after having been shortlisted for the Journalism Prize that year.

## Controversy

In 2008 the winner in the Journalism category was Johann Hari. In July 2011 the Council of the Orwell Prize decided to revoke Hari's award and withdraw the prize. Public announcement was delayed as Hari was then under investigation by The Independent for professional misconduct. In September 2011 Hari announced that he was returning his prize "as an act of contrition for the errors I made elsewhere, in my interviews", although he "stands by the articles that won the prize". A few weeks later, the Council of the Orwell Prize confirmed that Hari had returned the plaque but not the £2,000 prize money, and issued a statement that one of the articles submitted for the prize, "How multiculturalism is betraying women", published by The Independent in April 2007, "contained inaccuracies and conflated different parts of someone else's story (specifically, a report in Der Spiegel)".
Hari did not initially return the prize money of £2,000. He later offered to repay the money, but Political Quarterly, responsible for paying the prize money in 2008, instead invited Hari to make a donation to English PEN, of which George Orwell was a member. Hari arranged with English PEN to make a donation equal to the value of the prize, to be paid in installments once Hari returned to work at The Independent. However, Hari did not return to work at The Independent.