Cry your heart out Iain Dale

Cry your heart out Iain Dale

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PRESS RELEASE: ORWELL PRIZE 2009
WINNERS ANNOUNCED
•Andrew Brown wins Book Prize for Fishing in Utopia
•Patrick Cockburn wins Journalism Prize for London Review of Books and The Independent
•Pseudonymous police blogger, Jack Night, wins Special Prize for Blogs
•Judges award additional Special Prize to Tony Judt
The Orwell Prize tonight, Wednesday 22nd April 2009, announces its winners for 2009, at its annual Awards
Ceremony at the Foreign Press Association, London. The judges unanimously decided upon the following winners.
Andrew Brown, journalist, author and editor of The Guardian’s Comment is free belief, won the Book Prize
for Fishing in Utopia, published by Granta. Brown lived in Sweden as a child in the 1960s, before returning ten
years later, marrying a Swedish woman, working in a timber mill and raising a small son in the country. Woven into
the personal memoir is an exploration of the social and political system of Sweden.
The judges said: “The book tells, in a style which is both charming and crystalline, the story of how the author
fell in love with Sweden and everything Swedish, including his first wife, the fishing and the socialism, more
particularly the spirit of equality which seemed to pervade the whole country. And when he falls out of love, it
is not a straightforward disillusionment but rather a rueful recognition of how incredibly hard it was and is for
a country of dirt-poor farmers to emerge into an industrial nation without losing some of the idealism in the
affluence. The descriptions of fishing are as enchanting as anything since Izaak Walton, but in its light and easy way
the book is as profound as it is enchanting.”
Patrick Cockburn won the Journalism Prize for articles from the London Review of Books - the first time
the publication has provided a Journalism Prize winner - and The Independent. An experienced Middle East
correspondent, winner of awards such as the Martha Gellhorn Prize and author of three books on Iraq, Cockburn
won not only for his work on the situation in Iraq, but also for an article on his son’s slide into schizophrenia. His
most recent book, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq (Faber), was longlisted for this year’s Book Prize.
The judges said: “Patrick Cockburn reminds us that reporting is the foundation stone of good journalism, and
that there’s no substitute for intimate knowledge when it comes to describing a country and its conflicts. He has
covered the Middle East for thirty years and his dispatches from Iraq are an exemplary untangling of the political
and social complexity that lies behind one of the world’s great crises. He writes fairly, compassionately and clearly,
with a steady and knowledgeable eye and without any self-dramatics. His work enriches our understanding.”
Jack Night, a serving police officer, won the Special Prize for Blogs for his blog, NightJack - An English
Detective. The pseudonymous Night won for his dispatches from the front line of policing, on dealing with
criminals and the courts, on the beat and with the bureaucracy.
The judges said: “Getting to grips with what makes an effective blog was intriguing – at their best, they offer a
new place for politics and political conversation to happen. The insight into the everyday life of the police that
Jack Night’s wonderful blog offered was – everybody felt – something which only a blog could deliver, and he
delivered it brilliantly. It took you to the heart of what a policeman has to do – by the first blogpost you were
hooked, and could not wait to click onto the next one.”
The judges also awarded a Special Prize for Lifetime Achievement to Tony Judt, whose book Reappraisals
(William Heinemann) had been shortlisted for the Book Prize. Previous winners of Special Prizes are Clive
James, Hugo Young, Lord (David) Lipsey (for his Bagehot columns in The Economist) and BBC Newsnight.