Irish author Donal Ryan has won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction for his novel Heart, Be at Peace.
Ryan, from Nenagh, Co Tipperary, described winning the award as “a great honour and very unexpected”.
“I was kind of getting past my imposter syndrome but it’s come charging right back up now,” he said. ”I’m not exactly politically active and am not astute when it comes to the syntheses between fiction’s political and aesthetic potentials, but I believe it’s true, to quote Toni Morrison, that ‘All good art is political. There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, we love the status quo.’”
Heart, Be at Peace explores the 21st century problems of a small, tight-knit community in Ireland. Set 10 years after his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, Ryan returns to the same Irish town, telling the story through 21 interconnected voices as the community faces contemporary challenges including social media, drugs, and illegal industries that threaten local children while the older generation struggles to protect what they hold dear.
The Orwell Foundation awards prizes for the work that comes closest to George Orwell’s own ambition “to make political writing into an art”.
Victoria Amelina, who died in July 2023 from injuries sustained in a Russian bombing of a restaurant in Kramatorsk, won the prize with her unfinished book Looking at Women Looking at War.
The book – Amelina’s only work of nonfiction – documents the resistance efforts of Ukrainian women, including a soldier, a human rights activist and a librarian.
Amelina “brings to her narrative the acuity of a journalist and the artistry of a born writer, making her a true heir of George Orwell”, said judging chair Kim Darroch.
Each prize is worth £3,000. Amelina’s husband, Alex, accepted the award on her behalf, and her prize money will go towards supporting the festival she started in Ukraine, New York Literary festival. New York is the town in Donetsk where Alex is from.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Amelina was working on a novel, but soon pivoted to poetry and nonfiction writing. She had sent the latest draft of Looking at Women Looking at War to a friend shortly before she was killed.
After her death at 37, a group of writers along with Alex arranged the material – which they estimated to be about 60% of what Amelina had planned – into a readable version, adding footnotes and sometimes inserting material from earlier drafts.
Last year, Hisham Matar won the fiction prize for My Friends, while Matthew Longo took home the nonfiction award for The Picnic.
