Hisham Matar and Matthew Longo take Orwell Book Prizes for 2024

Alexandra Harris, that chaired the political fiction panel, stated: “My Buddies is a work of elegance, intellect, beauty and meekness, provided in the face of candid violence and tyranny. The shootings at the Libyan embassy in London in 1984 reverberate through the unique, defining the lives of boys who can not run the risk of return to their households and their indigenous country. Matar’s response to those gunshots is a richly sustained reflection on exile and distance, love and relationship, growing with each page as layers of recollection and experience accumulate.”

Peter Frankopan, the chair of the non-fiction evaluating panel, stated: “It was incredibly hard to pick a victor from this year’s shortlist which included an unusual number of contemporary standards– publications that will certainly be read for years. Probably there were a lot of great books because we are living through an era of change, and so political non-fiction writing is so powerful; or perhaps we were just uncommonly fortunate.”

My Friends by Matar– selected from a shortlist of eight stories– explores the fallout of the 1984 capturings at the Libyan embassy in London, and its result on 3 Libyan good friends residing in exile in Britain.

The political writing panel was chaired by the chronicler Peter Frankopan, that was joined by writer and supervisor of the brain trust British Future Sunder Katwala, reporter Christina Lamb, literary critic Lola Seaton, and Rohan Silva, founder of Second Home and former senior plan advisor in 10 Downing Street.

Longo’s The Outing– picked from a shortlist of nine non-fiction publications– discovers the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Iron Drape told with an unknown tale of the 1989 actions of a team of Hungarian activists that entered the restricted militarised zone of the Iron Drape and had a barbecue.

This year’s Orwell reward for political fiction has actually been awarded to Pulitzer reward champion Hisham Matar for his novel My Pals (Viking), while this year’s gong for non-fiction political writing went to Matthew Longo for The Outing: A Getaway to Flexibility and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain (Bodley Head).

The political fiction judging panel is chaired by literary movie critic and cultural chronicler Alexandra Harris, novelists Simon Okotie and Ross Raisin, and Lara Choksey, speaker at the College of English, UCL.