ORWELL PRIZE TO RUN WEEK OF EVENTS AT OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL,
ANNOUNCE LONGLISTS

·    Longlists announced on Wednesday 24th March
·    Speakers include John Kampfner, Sir Ian Blair, Ed Vaizey MP and David Mitchell
·    Three events on Burma mark 75th anniversary of Burmese Days

The Orwell Prize, Britain’s most prestigious prize for political writing, is to run a week of political and literary events at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival (20th – 28th March 2010) for a second year. The Prize will also be announcing its longlists for 2010 at the Festival.

As part of its ambition to get people talking and thinking about politics, the Prize will be running a series of panel discussions on free speech, the economy, policing, the future of Great Britain, torture, the intelligence services, Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, and the BBC, with leading experts in their fields.

These include John Kampfner (Index on Censorship), Catherine Bennett (Orwell Prize-shortlisted journalist) and Geoffrey Robertson QC on the limits to free speech; Sir Ian Blair (former Metropolitan police commissioner), Roger Graef (writer and broadcaster) and Robert Reiner (criminologist) on the future of policing; and David Mitchell (actor, comedian and Observer columnist), Jean Seaton (director of the Orwell Prize, official historian of the BBC) and Ed Vaizey MP (shadow arts minister) on 'what is the BBC for?'

The Prize will also be organising three events on Burma, marking the 75th anniversary of Orwell’s Burmese Days first being published in the UK: a panel discussion with Tin Htar Swe (Burma editor, BBC World Service), Justin Wintle (author of Perfect Hostage, a biography of Aung San Suu Kyi) and Maung Zarni (LSE; Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok); a screening of the Oscar-nominated Burma VJ; and a screening of the Rory Peck Award-winning Dispatches: Orphans of Burma’s Cyclone, followed by a Q&A with the producers.

The Prize’s other events include a screening of the Emmy Award-winning George Orwell: A Life in Pictures. For a full listing, see http://theorwellprize.co.uk/the-award/events-diary.aspx.  

The longlists for the Orwell Prize 2010 – traditionally consisting of 18 books, 12 journalists and 12 bloggers – will be announced at the Festival, at 7.30pm on Wednesday 24th March. This year’s judges are Jonathan Heawood (director, English PEN), Andrew Holgate (literary editor, Sunday Times) and Francine Stock (writer and broadcaster) for the Book Prize; Roger Graef (writer and broadcaster) and Peter Kellner (journalist, President of YouGov) for the Journalism Prize; and Richard Horton (Orwell Prize-winning blogger, ‘Jack Night’) and Oona King (head of diversity, Channel 4).

The shortlists (of six in each category) will be announced at a debate on ‘have the political classes been fatally weakened?’, at Thomson Reuters on Thursday 15th April.
The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on 19th May at Church House, Westminster.