The Best Politics Books of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing

The shortlist of the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, awarded annually to a nonfiction book, is presented below. Comments are from the prize’s judging panel, which in 2024 was chaired by Peter Frankopan, and also included Christina Lamb, Lola Seaton, Rohan Silva and Sunder Katwala. This year’s winner was The Picnic by Matthew Longo.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama tells the story of a terrible school bus crash in 2012 on a highway outside Jerusalem used predominantly by Palestinians, which was badly maintained and heavily congested thanks to Israeli checkpoints. The accident killed six Palestinian children, including Milad, Abed Salama’s five-year-old son. It is a powerful, timely and original work of reportage by the Jerusalem-based American journalist Nathan Thrall.

In plain, vivid prose, Thrall unspools the sequence of events leading up to the crash from multiple perspectives, in plain vivid prose, delving into Abed’s past and into the lives of other parents and family members. Thrall’s careful, historically informed reporting illuminates with distressing clarity the way the Israeli occupation and apartheid system suffuse the intimate lives of Palestinians in the West Bank, leading not only to daily inconveniences, hardships and indignities, but tragedies—accidents that could and should have been avoided—Lola Seaton, judge, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing

Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Years of Human Evolution reimagines evolution through the female of the species. It’s told with pace, wit and scholarship, and made me laugh, made me gasp, made me angry. From the first ever breast-feeder, Morgie the Jurassic rodent, to mallard ducks and whether men evolved to rape, and the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, this book has an astonishing range. I learnt new things on every page. Why hasn’t this book been written before?—Christina Lamb, judge, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing

Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad is the powerfully told, meticulously researched and deeply humane testimony of how Daniel Finkelstein’s family history was shaped by the brutality, war and totalitarianism of the Nazi and Communist dictatorships. The book connects the threads of the last century in a way that brings home just how recent its horrors were—Sunder Katwala, judge, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing

Our Enemies Will Vanish is a superb account of the build-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 by Yaroslav Trofimov, one of the world’s most astute observers of global affairs. Trofimov explains how the bloodiest war Europe has seen since 1945 broke out, and sets out with admirable clarity what is at stake for Ukraine, as well as for the rest of the world—Peter Frankopan, chair, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing

Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain is a sparkling book that is all the more remarkable for being the author’s first. Okundaye is an outstanding guide to what it means to be black and gay in Britain, providing a perspective to the last four decades that is as revelatory as it is important. It’s a marvellous piece of work that makes us think hard about how much we truly know about the country we live in—Peter Frankopan, chair, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the Middle East, 1979-2003 is a rigorous, expertly controlled account of what Steve Coll calls the ‘march to disaster’—the US’s decades-long dealings with Saddam Hussein, characterized by fateful miscalculations and misunderstandings on both sides—a ‘cascade of errors’, as Coll puts it—and culminating in the catastrophically misjudged American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

A staff writer at the New Yorker and author of several previous books about US involvement in the Middle East, Coll traces the vicissitudes of the US’s relationship with Hussein from his rise to power in 1979 and inauguration of Iraq’s secret nuclear weapons programme, through the precarious collaboration forged with the Reagan administration during the Iraq-Iran war, to the decisive unravelling of relations after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing botched efforts of the CIA to covertly overthrow Hussein. Partly based on 2,000 hours of Hussein’s taped meetings with advisers—which the US discovered during the invasion and some of which Coll accessed by suing the Pentagon—Coll’s intricate, absorbing narrative illuminates the role of political folly, hubris and naivety in a region that continues to be roiled by devastating conflicts—Lola Seaton, judge, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing

In The Incarcerations Alpa Shah tells the sprawling stories of some of India’s bravest campaigners and activists. The health—or otherwise—of India’s democracy is about as big as political questions get. The book reveals an awful lot that’s worrying about India today, but also gives us ample reason to believe that a brighter future may lie ahead—Rohan Silva, judge, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing

Can a book about a towering philosopher ever be described as ‘zippy’? That’s the word that keeps coming back to me when I think about Lyndsey Stonebridge’s compellingly readable book on Hannah Arendt’s life and work. With antisemitism and totalitarianism on the rise in 2024, Arendt’s lucid thinking is as relevant as ever. We Are Free to Change the World deserves to be read far and wide,  especially on university campuses.—Rohan Silva, judge, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing

In the summer of 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did something unthinkable: they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain—and held a picnic. They were joined by East German holidaymakers in Ladas rolling up for goulash, beer and brass-bands. I did not know this story and I loved the way it surprised me and captured the time, the idealism, and the role of ordinary citizens in the unravelling of the Iron Curtain, as well as its echoes for today. It’s wonderfully told through extensive interviews with everyone from the human rights activist who came up with the madcap idea, the stubborn young woman who made it happen, to Stasi agents and border guards—Christina Lamb, judge, 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing

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