Show Me The Bodies wins the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2023

23rd June, 2023

Peter Apps has won the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

At the ceremony at Conway Hall in London on 22nd June Apps received the Orwell Prize for Political Writing for his book Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen.

The Orwell Prize was first awarded in 1994, making Show Me the Bodies the 30th winner of the prize. The prizes aim to encourage good writing and thinking about politics, with judges asked to find winning entries which meet Orwell’s own ambition “to make political writing into an art.”

The judges described Show Me the Bodies as “a magnificent book that deftly combines vivid, compelling accounts of the victims of the fire with forensic (but no less engaging) detail on the decades of politics and policy which led up to it.” They added: “Expect to find yourself crying over details of building regulations you never knew existed – and over the fact that so many of us let shifts in such regulations go unnoticed, to such devastating impact. Show Me the Bodies has the values of the Orwell Prize at its core: it is beautiful writing about a devastating subject that we should all understand.”