Gary Younge has won the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism.
The Stevenage-born journalist, who was previously a columnist for the Guardian and is now a professor at the University of Manchester, has said he is "chuffed" to take home the award.
The Orwell Prizes are the UK's most prestigous awards for political writing, and are given each year to the work that comes closest to George Orwell's ambition "to make political writing into an art".
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown chaired the panel of judges that gave Gary the award, with his entry based on three pieces:
- An essay titled 'Lest we remember: how Britain buried its history of slavery'
- An article titled 'How racism shaped my critical eye'
- A podcast titled 'Facts That Matter'
Gary has twice previously been shortlisted for an Orwell Award - the Prize for Books in 2018, and the Prize for Journalism in 2021.
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He has spoken to the Comet about his "very fond memories" of growing up in Stevenage in the 1970s and early 1980s, despite there being "plenty of instances of racist abuse".
Gary's most recent book is Dispatches from the Diaspora, a collection of his journalism on race, racism and black life and death.
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