In 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay in which he outlined the four main reasons for writing.

One was egoism, another “aesthetic enthusiasm”. The third was “historical impulse… the desire to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.” This was closely linked to the fourth, “political purpose”, which he described as “the desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive for.”

Sadly, the totalitarianism and dictatorships Orwell railed against are with us still, even if in different shape. In a jingle he dashed off to prod himself into action, he wrote “I wasn’t born for an age like this./ Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?” It was a direct challenge to writers to make a stand, to heed their consciences, avoid fence-sitting and choose a side.

His words have a particular resonance for me this week, after learning that the editor for whom I wrote at Apple Daily, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy paper, has been arrested. His detention at Hong Kong airport follows the arrest of Apple Daily’s owner, Jimmy Lai, and more recently of six other senior figures. All are accused of colluding with foreign forces. After its assets were frozen, last week the paper had no alternative but to close.

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As the Chinese authorities crush any dissent, the situation in Hong Kong is bleak for anyone whose business it is to report and comment on what they see. Following new national security laws, freedom of speech is becoming a distant dream, the cost of speaking out too dangerous. What will happen to the imprisoned Apple Daily staff no-one knows.

Although it will bring little comfort to them or their families, you can be sure that one day the full story of Apple Daily and its extraordinarily courageous journalists will be told. In the meantime, I have discovered, as a judge for the 2021 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, just how many writers are putting into practice Orwell’s injunction, and living up to his ideals of exposing lies and uncovering the truth.

The Orwell Foundation runs several prizes, whose winners were announced on June 25, Orwell’s birthday. As well as Political Writing – won by Joshua Yaffa for Between Two Fires, of which more later – there is a category for Political Fiction, which was won by Ali Smith for her novel Summer; one for Journalism, and one for “Exposing Britain’s Social Evils”. (Details on the Orwell Foundation website.)

November saw the start of what I look back on as my winter of discontent. Boxes of books were delivered as if Christmas had come early, piled in towers in the sitting room to provide a supplementary coffee table. And much caffeine was consumed as I, and my fellow judges, began to work our way through a selection winnowed from an original list of around 250 titles.

The discontent was not mine, I should add, but the subject matter of these books. They ranged from homelessness in the UK, and our beleaguered care system, to Brexit, Trump’s America, and the state of Europe; there were biographies of totemic figures such as Toussaint L’Ouverture and JFK, and social and political histories. There was an undercover report into far-right extremism, a memoir-manifesto of British farming, and correctives to the colonial view of history and the all-white narrative of Europe.

Looking up at the end of a chapter, to see snow falling on bare-branched trees, was a jolt. After absorbing so much anguish, exploitation, corruption and power-mongering it felt unreal to be faced with a tranquil scene. Not everything was misery, though, and while some books were more compelling than others, almost everything was interesting. It was like being plunged into an Open University course. I would resurface each day with my mind broadened, and some of the woeful gaps in my knowledge plugged.

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Immediately striking was the bravery of some of the finest writers. Not everyone is called to be a foreign correspondent, like Christina Lamb, but her clear-eyed, harrowing account, Our Bodies, Their Battlefield, of women raped as a tactic of war, will remain with me forever. So too Barbara Demick’s undercover reporting of Tibet’s oppressed and exiled citizens, Eat the Buddha.

With so many books, how could four judges ever hope to agree? Our chair, Professor Anand Menon of King’s College, London, kept a wise hand on the tiller as the rest of us – Angela Saini, a broadcaster and journalist, and Professor Richard Ekins, of the University of Oxford – picked our way through this library.

It is a measure of the outstanding quality of Joshua Yaffa’s writing that, despite our diverse interests and outlooks, and the strength of the competition, his book emerged as the clear winner. Yaffa is a correspondent for the New Yorker in Moscow, and Between Two Fires depicts a selection of contemporary Russians who have learned to negotiate the minefield of the repressive and quixotic Putin state to achieve their ambitions. It is a masterly portrait of compromise and cunning, and what walking this highwire does to an individual, and to the body politik. It is also beautifully written, with attitude and humour.

Visiting Oleg Zubkov, who runs a safari park in Crimea, Yaffa watches in horror as the zoo-keeper heads for the lions, “smothering a 400-pound lion with the sort of hug you give a Labrador, rubbing his cheek against the lion’s and giving its nose a soft poke with his finger”. When another growls, he waves his rubber slipper at it, which seems to do the trick.

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Zubkov’s crazy confidence and courage could stand as a metaphor for the precarious line trodden by all the larger than life personalities in this work. It also sums up anyone, anywhere in the world, who dares to confront an oppressive regime.

Describing his literary ambition in the same essay, Orwell wrote, “What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.”

It is in part thanks to him that so many, like Yaffa and the other Orwell Prize contenders, are inspired to do the same.

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