Kamran Abbasi, Edior in chief of The BMJ and Trustee of the Orwell Foundation, invites MJA members to enter the 2026 Orwell Prize.
Dear Colleague,
We’re now a little over a week away from the close of entry for this year’s Orwell Prizes in journalism. There are three categories: Journalism, Exposing Britain’s Social Evils, and Reporting Homelessness.
As a medical editor and a trustee of the Orwell Foundation I think we need greater recognition of the tremendous work that you do. The Orwell Prizes are prestigious and I know the judges are keen to consider submissions from health and science journalists.
The deadline is 31st March.
Here is some more information about the journalism prize specifically (remember there are also prizes for exposing social evils and reporting homelessness):
The Orwell Prize for Journalism
The Orwell Prizes exist to reward the political writing and reporting which best meets the spirit of George Orwell’s own ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’. The Prize is awarded to a journalist for sustained reportage and/or commentary working in any medium. A submission should consist of a minimum of three and a maximum of four articles in any combination of media. This might consist of, for example, three printed articles, three television or radio broadcasts or a combination of different media. The Prize is free to enter and entrants may include work published by different organisations.
George Orwell cared not only about what he wrote, but how he wrote it. His assessment of what makes for good writing – and bad writing – is as relevant today as it was in 1946, when his essay Why I Write was published:
“My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience…. So long as I remain alive and well, I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”
George Orwell, Why I Write
The Foundation encourages a broad attitude to what qualifies as ‘political’. In Orwell’s world, politics is defined in the widest sense to include the natural world, societal issues, international relations, domestic politics etc.
Each year, judges are encouraged to reflect, personally and as a panel, on the ways these values can be embodied in the particular genre or medium they are considering:
- Political purpose: “Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.”
- Clarity of expression: “Good prose is like a windowpane.”
- Intellectual courage: “Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.”
- Critical thought: “To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.”
- Artful writing: “Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.”
To find out more and enter the 2026 Orwell Prize visit https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-prizes/how-to-enter/