Journalism prize winner
Wendell Steavenson
1843 magazine (The Economist)Wendell Steavenson is a writer and journalist. She has written for The Guardian, the Financial Times, Granta, and The New Yorker, among other publications, and is the author of three nonfiction books and two novels. Over the past two years, she has reported from Ukraine as well as Georgia and Israel Palestine for 1843 magazine. She was a Neiman Fellow in 2014 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2021. Her book Circling the Square was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Books in 2016.
Her shortlisted pieces are:
- An autistic Ukrainian boy lived by routine. Then the Russians upended his world
- A vast Ukrainian cemetery awaits the casualties of the counter-offensive
- How one kibbutz defended itself from Hamas
- Russia has taken thousands of Ukrainian kids. Some don’t want to go home
We were struck by the commitment and versatility of Wendell Steavenson who contributed two forceful and stark dispatches from the Ukraine before pivoting after October 7th to the Gaza conflict and producing a meticulous account of an attack on a kibbutz which is – irrespective of one’s position – unarguably an outstanding piece of reporting. Good prose is like a windowpane, Orwell wrote, and Steavenson’s is admirably clear.
– Janice Gibson, Chair of Judges, The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2024
