James Meek, a novelist who has been in the running for some of the UK’s top literary awards for his fiction, has made it on to the shortlist for the Orwell prize for political writing for his look at the privatisation of Britain over the last three decades.
Longlisted for the Booker for his novel The People’s Act of Love, and shortlisted for the Costa for The Heart Broke In, Meek’s Private Island is now one of six contenders for the Orwell book prize, which is awarded for the piece of writing judges deem to be closest to George Orwell’s own ambition “to make political writing into an art”. Published by radical press Verso, Private Island considers how everything from the UK’s rail services to its municipal housing has been sold to private owners over the last generation, and the impact this has had on ordinary citizens.
“As demolition jobs go, this can hardly be bettered. The absence of polemic makes the quietly withering prose all the more powerful,” wrote John Kampfner in the Observer. “Meek bombards the reader with compelling facts, but he does so with panache. After all, how many authors could turn a passage about ownership of the water industry into a page-turner?”
Private Island was shortlisted alongside another work by a writer who has won prizes for his fiction in the past: Rana Dasgupta’s Capital, a portrait of Delhi from an author who took the Commonwealth book prize for his novel Solo.
Dan Davies’ biography of Jimmy Savile, In Plain Sight, was also picked by judges Claire Armitstead of the Guardian, writer Gillian Slovo and Tony Wright, as was David Kynaston’s analysis of post-war Britain, Modernity Britain, Nick Davies’ look at the phone hacking scandal, Hack Attack, and Louisa Lim’s take on Tiananmen Square, The People’s Republic of Amnesia.
“Orwell was never parochial,” said director of the Orwell prize professor Jean Seaton. “His work spans international events and the national condition, and that range is represented in the shortlist. The books place Britain’s circumstances alongside those of India and China.”
The shortlist for the £3,000 award was announced on Tuesday night, with the winner to be revealed on 21 May.
