Orwell Prize 2012 Longlist Announced

The longlist for this year’s Orwell Book Prize, Britain’s most prestigious prize for political writing, has been announced today, Wednesday 28^th March 2012.

 Book Prize

A record 264 books were whittled down to 18 by this year’s judges, Miranda Carter (writer and winner of the Orwell Prize 2002 for Anthony Blunt: His Lives), Sameer Rahim (assistant books editor, Daily Telegraph) and Baroness Helena Kennedy QC (previously shortlisted for Just Law).

The longlisted books are:

Rodric Braithwaite  Afgansty (Profile Books)

Sherard Cowper-Cowles  Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign (HarperPress)

Siddhartha Deb  The Beautiful and the Damned: A portrait of the New India (Penguin)

Misha Glenny  Dark Market: CyberThieves, CyberCops and You (Vintage)

Robin Harris  The Conservatives: A History (Transworld Publishers)

Toby Harnden  Dead Men Risen (Quercus)

Christopher Hitchens  Arguably (Atlantic books)

Gavin Knight  Hood Rat (Picador)

Anatol Lieven  Pakistan: A hard country (Penguin)

Richard Lloyd Parry  People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman (Jonathan Cape)

Julia Lovell  The Opium War (Pan Macmillan)

Caroline Moorehead  A Train in Winter: A Story of Resistance, Friendship and Survival (Vintage)

Douglas Murray  Bloody Sunday: Truths, Lies and The Saville Inquiry (Biteback publishing)

Sonia Purnell  Just Boris: The Irresistible Rise of a Political Celebrity

Jeffrey Sachs  The Price of Civilization (Vintage)

Lucy Siegle  To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World (HarperPress)

Christopher Turner  Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex (HarperPress)

Conor Woodman  Unfair Trade (Hutchinson)

Christopher Hitchens is longlisted for a second consecutive year after making it onto the 2011 shortlist with ‘Hitch-22’.  Also longlisted for a second time is Anatol Lieven, who first appeared on the longlist in 1994.