The Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness 2023 asked for entries from people experiencing homelessness and from journalists who shine a light on the problem and its potential solutions.
On 22nd June 2023 Daniel Lavelle and Freya Marshall Payne were announced as joint winners of the inaugural prize. Carolyn Atkinson (BBC Woman’s Hour & You and Yours) and Jack Simpson (Inside Housing) were also Highly Commended by the judges for their entries reporting on the growing scandal of ‘exempt accommodation’.
Chair of Judges, Alan Rusbridger, said:
“We had an impossible task in trying to separate our two winners. Daniel and Freya’s entries were united not only by their quality but by the powerful, hard-won use to which they put their own different experiences. In Daniel’s case, this involved growing up in care: For Freya it was coming to recognise her own experience of insecure housing was a form of hidden homelessness. Both take the reader on a journey which helps us understand the wider challenges we face in solving homelessness today, in all its forms – and the solutions that might help get us there.”
The finalists for the inaugural Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness are:
Carolyn Atkinson (BBC Woman’s Hour & You and Yours)
- Rogue Refuges: Charlotte’s story, ‘Two toilet rolls and a washing tablet.’
- Rogue Refuges: The cowboy landlords taking on councils – and winning
- Rogue Refuges: The ‘goldrush’ bankrolling the homelessness crisis.
Lucy Campbell (Single Homeless Project)
- ‘Making women count’: challenging the systems that keep women’s rough sleeping unseen
- Out of sight, out of mind? One woman’s story of surviving hidden rough sleeping
Daniel Hewitt (ITV News)
- The people profiting from the homelessness crisis
- Facing eviction with no where to go
- The true scale of homelessness in England
Daniel Lavelle (The Guardian)
- ‘Being homeless felt inevitable’: after years in care, I was living in a tent. Who was to blame?
- Here’s why so many people sleep rough on Britain’s streets – Sunak’s Tories have chosen to leave them there
- One pay packet away from the streets: the workers who became homeless in the pandemic
Freya Marshall Payne (The Guardian, new writing)
- Hidden UK homelessness is about to get much worse, with Covid support being cut
- Hidden Homelessness: Exploring Silences
Zohra Naciri (new writing)
Jack Simpson (Inside Housing)
- How Birmingham became the centre of a supported housing controversy
- Inside exempt accommodation: what it is really like to live in sub-standard supported housing
- The true cost of exempt accommodation
Vicky Spratt (The i paper)
- Homeless in five minutes – the devastating impact of the UK’s cost of living crisis
- ‘The loss is a part of me now’: When homeless children die in temporary accommodation
- Inside the UK’s ‘human warehouses’
Daniel Trilling (Prospect)
Commenting on the shortlist, Rusbridger said:
Some of Orwell’s most vivid and impactful writing was on the theme of homelessness, hence this year’s decision to add a new category. We were so impressed by the quality and quantity of the entries, which collectively told a depressing and shaming story about a crisis in towns and cities across the country. The shortlisted entries span memoir, reporting, video, audio, data, academic research, stories of lived experience and more. Though the overall picture they describe is often a harrowing one it is heartening that so many writers, researchers and journalists remain doggedly committed to documenting the crisis so tellingly.”
About the Prize
In Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), George Orwell’s vivid reportage combined evidence with empathy, describing the root causes of homelessness and poverty and their brutal impact. Crucially, he wrote about those on the receiving end of injustice with respect and dignity.
In the ninetieth anniversary year of the book, we and our partners, the Centre for Homelessness Impact, want the Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness 2023 to shine a light on new forms of homelessness including temporary and precarious housing, sofa surfing and beds in sheds as well as rough sleeping and hostel-dwelling.
Orwell portrays the people he meets, living in filthy, bug-ridden boarding houses and on the streets of Paris and London, as victims of circumstance, not culpable for their own misfortune or wretchedness. It is this spirit of writing that The Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness will recognise and reward.
We want the new Prize to celebrate evidence-led reporting and to focus attention on simple questions: What does homelessness look like in contemporary Britain? Why do we still have hundreds of thousands of people affected by homelessness despite decades of efforts to find solutions? What do we know of what works, to prevent people from falling into homelessness or to help them exit once they do? Is there any new thinking or promising innovation that evidence suggests may yield better results than current approaches?
Orwell believed passionately that the way in which an issue was described was as important as the topic itself. Evidence shows that in modern writing about homelessness, stigma, stereotypes and false narratives appear so frequently that they present a tangible barrier to public understanding of the problem. Our independent judges will look out for terminology that avoids implications of blame for the circumstances in which people find themselves.
The 2023 Prize for Reporting Homelessness will recognise work published or created between 1st April 2021 and 17th April 2023.
Rules and full eligibility criteria for all the Prizes are available here.
- Listen to our new podcast series with the Prison Radio Association and the Centre for Homelessness Impact
- About The Orwell Prizes
- The Centre for Homelessness Impact
