The Best Political Novels of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Fiction

The novels that made the 2024 shortlist are listed below. Comments are from the prize’s judging panel, which in 2024 was chaired by Alexandra Harris, and also included Lara Choksey, Ross Raisin and Simon Okotie:

Blackouts by Justin Torres is a formal masterpiece, creating its own zone beyond the story it tells: a redacted history of queer sexology via an intergenerational deathbed dialogue. This intricate collage of record and remembrance is held together by poetry, art, photography, and institutional documents, and hinges its political world-building on the pleasures to be had in this compilation. In exquisite prose, Torres shows how choosing another inheritance might alter a future that seems inexorable—Lara Choksey, judge, Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

In Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan, everything is connected in a teeming, gripping, horrifying panorama of British society. In the tradition of Fielding, Dickens, and Orwell himself, the novelist gets everywhere: slipping into the Old Bailey, inviting himself to the polo, sharing a Mayfair magnum while taking notes. And, true to that tradition, Caledonian Road is absolutely contemporary: it gets to work in a world of branding and media spin, of hacking and cover-ups. It asks where the money is coming from, and who knows what, and how chasms of inequality are widening between people passing on the same London pavement—Alexandra Harris, chair, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

The magisterial craft of James by Percival Everett lies in its combination of biting humour and a page-turning plot, with ruminations on sovereignty and Voltaire along the way. Everett stays close, if not true, to the dangerous journeys of Huckleberry Finn, and draws on titans of post-Reconstruction African American writing to bring Jim to the foreground of the story. As we keep pace with our charismatic narrator, Twain’s tale of friendship on the run is converted into a larger history of collective freedom won through close encounters with the great American outdoors and its jealous, violent gatekeepers—Lara Choksey, judge, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

My Friends by Hisham Matar is a novel that explores the fallout of the 1984 shootings at the Libyan embassy in London, and its effect on three friends. The quietness of the prose belies the event’s traumatic drama and its profound personal and political repercussions. The style is old-fashioned – genteel almost – and authentic to the point of reading like the most exquisite memoir. A warm and extraordinarily clear-sighted novel that is, in part, about the power of the literary word to effect real-world change—Simon Okotie, judge, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

In Ocean Stirrings, Merle Collins fuses history and invention with utmost care and creativity in a book that imagines the thinking, reading, working, politically active lives of the women who came before Malcolm X. Capacious in scope, Ocean Stirrings spans two centuries, taking us from Grenada to Canada to the USA, considering African inheritance and European power. Yet it’s also a work of stillness and close attention. It makes space for the story of a girl in a Grenadian classroom, reading Byron, reading Cowper, asking questions of the world, given courage by her teachers and her mother to make her own decisions. With a deep sense of purpose and not a hint of literary showiness, Collins brings together many voices, from eighteenth-century English letter-writers to Black rights orators, and she honours the rich Grenadian creole, now largely lost, with a new life here on the page—Alexandra Harris, chair, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

Orbital by Samantha Harvey is an obliquely political and beautifully strange narrative in which the message is never in your face – rather, diffused from above in a way that is at once mesmerizing and troubling. This is a novel that asks questions about an earth lined with its own human markings of war, industry, climate change; written with such a delicate touch that it is only afterwards that you understand the activating power of the book you’ve just held in your hands—Ross Raisin, judge, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan is a novel that handles trauma with honesty and care. There is no sugar-coating with virtue or easy beauty here. This is a story that employs a cleanly cinematic gaze to observe the plain disintegration of a family through a pattern of social circumstance, addiction and prejudice, egged on by the ruthlessness of 90s tabloid journalism – to give us a portrayal of a society both fractured and hopeful—Ross Raisin, judge, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

The Future Future by Adam Thirlwell is an exuberant novel about power and how it is exercised. It provides a historical, anachronism-defying narrative centred on Celine and her intimate friends in revolutionary Paris. Continually shifting registers, it traverses an extraordinary fictional universe that is somehow also grounded, coherent and compelling. At times abstract and philosophical, this acutely observed novel is warm, smart, and (to adopt its own idiom) ‘super contemporary.’—Simon Okotie, judge, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

Find out more about the Orwell Prizes and the work of the Orwell Foundation here.