Donal Ryan wins Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

Irish author Donal Ryan has won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction for his novel Heart, Be At Peace.

The Nenagh native commented on his win, describing the award as “a great honour and very unexpected".

"I was kind of getting past my imposter syndrome but it’s come charging right back up now,” he said. ”I’m not exactly politically active and am not astute when it comes to the syntheses between fiction’s political and aesthetic potentials, but I believe it’s true, to quote Toni Morrison, that ‘All good art is political. There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, we love the status quo.’”

The novel, which is set a decade after his lauded debut novel, The Spinning Heart, tells the story of a small-knit town through the voices of 21 different characters.

This year’s judging panel for the Orwell Prize was chaired by author Jim Crace, who said that Ryan’s book won the award “for its clarity” and "for its twenty one perfectly pitched voices".

“Here is a small deprived community in rural Ireland, after the Good Friday Peace Accord and the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, suffering and recovering from the bruises of its political and economic past,” Crace continued. “The boom years – in both senses of that word – might be over, but in Donal Ryan’s exceptional Heart, Be At Peace, the echoes still reverberate and hum.”

Ukrainian novelist and war crimes investigator, Victoria Amelina, posthumously won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing for her book Looking at Women, Looking at War.

The author's unfinished work documents the Ukrainian people’s resistance and was described by the judges as "a testimony and a precious, powerful work of literature, a steady beam of light born amid darkness and violence”.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, Amelina joined the resistance. She died on July 1st, 2023, from injuries sustained in the Russian bombing of a restaurant in Kramatorsk.

The Orwell Foundation awards prizes for the work that comes closest to George Orwell’s own ambition “to make political writing into an art”.

There is a prize of £3,000 (€3,517) for each of the winners.