Transcription by Ben Lerner wins Orwell prize for political fiction

Judging chair calls Lerner’s novel a ‘funny, brainy and timely’ study of our appetite for technology, while Karen Bartlett wins the nonfiction prize for The Escape from Kabul American writer Ben Lerner has won this year’s Orwell prize for political fiction for Transcription, a novel exploring technology and memory. In nonfiction, the prize went to Karen Bartlett for The Escape from Kabul, which looks at Afghan women lawyers who came under threat after the fall of Kabul in 2021. The prizes, which aim to highlight books that best meet Orwell’s own ambition “to make political writing into an art”, come with £5,000. The first section of Lerner’s novel sees the narrator travelling to Providence, Rhode Island, to conduct a final interview with an eccentric German intellectual, Thomas. However, in his hotel room, the narrator drops his phone in the sink, meaning he’s left with no functioning recording device. He proceeds with the interview without telling Thomas that the conversation is going unrecorded. “A forensic study of our insatiable appetite for new technology, [Transcription] explores the unreliable stories we tell ourselves about hunger, love and connection,” said judging chair F