We are delighted that Peter Apps has won the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Writing for his debut non-fiction book on the Grenfell tower disaster, Show Me The Bodies, published by Oneworld Publications.

The judging panel praised the book as:

“A magnificent book that deftly combines vivid, compelling accounts of the victims of the fire with forensic (but no less engaging) detail on the decades of politics and policy which led up to it. Expect to find yourself crying over details of building regulations you never knew existed – and over the fact that so many of us let shifts in such regulations go unnoticed, to such devastating impact. Show Me the Bodies has the values of The Orwell Prize at its core: it is beautiful writing about a devastating subject that we should all understand.”

Congratulations to the author! We also wanted to congratulate Aitken Alexander authors Diana Evans, who was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction for her novel A House for Alice (Chatto), and Vicky Spratt, who was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness for her work with The i paper.

You can read more about the Orwell Prize here.