Ali Smith has won the Orwell prize for political fiction for Summer, a novel written at speed last year, which judges described as “a time-capsule which will prove to be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the mood of Britain during this turbulent time”.
The Scottish author came up with her project to write four political novels in real time back in 2015, starting with Autumn. Smith began writing Summer, the final book in her Seasonal Quartet, in January 2020 and it was published in August. The novel includes references to Covid-19, Australian wildfires, Brexit and the murder of George Floyd.
Smith’s Summer beat titles including Colum McCann’s Apeirogon and Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji to the £3,000 prize, which goes to the work of fiction that comes closest to George Orwell’s ambition “to make political writing into an art”.
The judges, headed by former Orwell prize winner Delia Jarrett-Macauley, said that Summer seals Smith’s reputation “as the great chronicler of our age”.
“Capturing a snapshot of life in Britain right up until the present day, Smith takes the emotional temperature of a nation grappling with a global pandemic, the brink of Brexit, heartbreaking conditions for refugees, and so much more,” the judges said.
Smith, accepting her prize in a speech next to the mural of Orwell at Southwold Pier in Suffolk, said she was “so happy” to win, citing Orwell’s ambitions for political writing and art.
“The place where these two things meet can’t not be a place of humane – and inhumane – revelation. To me, that’s what the word Orwellian means,” said Smith, who was previously shortlisted and longlisted for the prize with her novels Winter and Spring respectively. “That’s why the past and future visions of his fiction will always be timeless, and why the Orwell prize for political fiction really matters.”
The £3,000 prize for political writing went to the Moscow-based journalist Joshua Yaffa’s Between Two Fires, a collection of portraits of individuals – from TV producers to priests – in contemporary Russia. Judges called it “magnificent and moving”, saying that Yaffa “illuminates the challenges of moral life and the ways in which authoritarian rule is maintained”.
Jaffa, in an acceptance speech from Moscow, said he was honoured to win a prize in the name of an author “who, perhaps more than any other, created a body of work that shows how one can write about politics with both clarity of thought and great humanity”.
“The exercise of power and politics – especially in a place like Putin-era Russia – can complicate or scramble the pursuit of a noble, honest life, but life in all its beauty and strangeness remains all the same, even for those who make their own accommodation with the system,” he said. “Orwell was a constant reference as I tried to untangle these stories and tell them with lucidity and, I hope, a measure of literary artistry.”
