Orwell Prize 2025: Political Fiction

Donal Ryan’s novel is a quiet yet devastating portrait of people caught in the crosscurrents of social and political upheaval. With his signature empathy, he builds a tapestry of interconnected voices whose lives are shaped by austerity, migration, and long-buried history. The prose is tender, rhythmic, and deceptively simple—every sentence carrying emotional weight. Ryan shows how politics infiltrates the most intimate spaces: the home, the heart, the choices characters never meant to make. It’s a novel of compassion and quiet rebellion, reminding us that resilience is often the ultimate political act. Haunting and humane, it lingers long after the last page.

Elif Shafak’s latest novel blends myth, memory, and political realism to tell a story of displacement and environmental crisis. Moving between continents and generations, she follows characters bound together by droughts, floods, and the politics of scarcity. Shafak’s talent for weaving personal stories with global issues shines, creating a narrative that is both intimate and sweeping. Her lyrical style brings emotional depth to questions of migration, ecological injustice, and ancestral resilience. Shafak challenges the reader to consider how climate and conflict shape not only landscapes but identities. A beautifully crafted, urgently relevant novel.

Adichie’s Dream Count is a sweeping, emotionally charged story about memory, state violence, and the quiet acts of resistance that define a life. Set across Nigeria and the diaspora, the novel follows characters whose dreams—literal and metaphorical—are shaped by political rupture. Adichie’s prose is rich, clear, and deeply humane, balancing intimate character work with sharp political observation. She explores how nations make and unmake identity, and how personal history becomes entwined with public struggle. With its depth, warmth, and incisiveness, the novel reinforces Adichie’s reputation as one of contemporary fiction’s most powerful storytellers.

Jo McMillan’s novel explores migration through a satirical yet heartfelt lens, following two families whose bureaucratic mishaps cast them into a limbo of paperwork, borders, and cultural absurdities. McMillan balances humour with critique, revealing the human cost of administrative systems that reduce people to forms and categories. Her characters are memorable, flawed, and full of unexpected resilience. The novel’s political bite comes from its realism: every comic moment rings disturbingly true. It’s a witty, empathic portrait of people navigating systems never designed for them—and finding connection despite it all.

In The Harrow, Noah Eaton imagines a society teetering on the edge of collapse, where technology promises progress while quietly corroding public trust. The novel centres on a whistleblower whose discovery exposes a hidden political machine manipulating truth at scale. Eaton weaves intricate psychological detail with fast-moving plot, creating a narrative that is both gripping and morally disorienting. The world he builds feels eerily plausible, a reflection of today’s anxieties about surveillance, misinformation, and institutional decay. Thoughtful, tense, and darkly atmospheric, the novel asks what resistance means when truth itself is unstable.

Natasha Brown expands the cool precision of Assembly into a wider, more ambitious political sphere. Universality examines the rhetoric of equality and the structures that quietly deny it, following characters whose lives intersect around questions of citizenship, identity, and belonging. Brown’s prose is minimalist yet razor-sharp, cutting through euphemism to expose the bureaucratic and psychological machinery of modern Britain. The novel refuses easy answers, instead illuminating the contradictions at the heart of progressive language. With unsettling clarity, Brown asks what 'universal' ever truly means—and who is left out of the promise. A sleek, incisive, deeply contemporary novel.

Robert Harris delivers another gripping political thriller, this time set in an eerily plausible near-future crisis. A veteran statesman is forced into a battle against internal sabotage, geopolitical brinkmanship, and the collapse of democratic norms. Harris excels at pacing, assembling layers of intrigue that escalate with alarming precision. The novel’s power lies in how close its fictional world feels to current events—enough to unsettle even as it entertains. Harris interrogates leadership, accountability, and the thin line between governance and chaos. Smart, tense, and sharply plotted, it’s political fiction at its most compulsive.

Edward St Aubyn turns his forensic wit and psychological insight toward questions of power, privilege, and moral illusion. Parallel Lines traces two families whose lives appear separate but intersect through political scandal, inherited wealth, and generational denial. St Aubyn’s prose is cutting yet elegant, revealing the brittle foundations beneath elite respectability. The novel is both satire and tragedy, exposing how private vulnerabilities ripple into public consequences. With precision and dark humour, St Aubyn dismantles the narratives people construct to excuse their complicity. It’s sharp, stylish, and quietly devastating.