`Biography` of Nineteen Eighty-Four leads Orwell prize longlist
(The Guardian Books News)

Dorian Lynskey´s The Ministry of Truth is among the contenders for the political writing award named after the dystopian classic´s authorDorian Lynskey´s `biography` of George Orwell´s dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four has made it on to the longlist for the Orwell prize for political writing.Set up by the Orwell Foundation, the £3,000 prize is intended to reward those books that best meet Orwell´s ambition `to make political writing into an art`. Lynskey´s The Ministry of Truth, which traces the origins of Nineteen Eighty-Four to the time Orwell spent fighting on the republican side in the Spanish civil war, is up against 11 other titles. These include Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman´s exposé The Windrush Betrayal, Caroline Criado Perez´s Invisible Women, about the gender data gap, and the poet Kate Clanchy´s memoir of life as a teacher, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. Continue reading...