Behind Closed Doors Shortlisted For The Orwell Prize For Political Writing

Download or read book Behind Closed Doors: SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING written by Polly Curtis and published by Virago. This book was released on 2022-02-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'BRILLIANT . . . I LOVE THIS BOOK' LEMN SISSAY 'A MUST-READ BOOK' JACQUELINE WILSON 'EXTRAORDINARY' OLIVER BULLOUGH 'EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK' HILARY COTTAM Meet the mother whose children were taken away, and the father who fought for his son. Listen to the radical social worker, the judge, the lawyer. See inside the homes of foster carers, adoptive parents and children in care. Because behind closed doors, a scandal is ongoing. We now remove more children from their parents than ever before, more than any other western country. Not because of a rise in physical or sexual abuse, but because of complex factors that are overlooked and misunderstood. Children's Care is a system where fathers are ignored, and mothers are punished for experiencing abuse. Rife with prejudices about race, ableism and class, determined by a postcode lottery. Blind to poverty and its effects on family life. And, at its very worst, an exercise in social engineering that can never replace parental love. This is not a soft issue. Not a 'women and children' problem. It is a prism through which we can understand the deepest issues at play in politics, economics and society today, and it is happening behind closed doors. Because of legal restrictions against reporting in family courts, the uneasy work of social care and the shame poured on parents, these problems remain out of our sight. They are the subject of horror headlines or stale statistics. But family life is at the heart of who we are as people, and it is they who can help us understand. From North to South, rich and poor, Black and white, these are the people who know, first-hand, what is going wrong - and how we can fix it. These are their stories. 'IMPORTANT' IAN BIRRELL 'VITAL' HANNAH JANE PARKINSON 'ONE OF BRITAIN'S BEST JOURNALISTS WRITING ABOUT SOCIAL JUSTICE' MARIANA MAZZUCATO

Download or read book Why I Write written by George Orwell and published by Renard Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

Download or read book My Fourth Time, We Drowned written by Sally Hayden and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of The Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2022 Winner of The Michel Déon Prize 2022 Winner of the An Post Irish Book of the Year Award 2022 Winner of the An Post Irish Book Award for Nonfiction 2022 A Financial Times Best Political Book of 2022 A Kirkus Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 A Guardian Best History and Politics Book of 2022 The Western world has turned its back on migrants, leaving them to cope with one of the most devastating humanitarian crises in history. Reporter Sally Hayden was at home in London when she received a message on Facebook: “Hi sister Sally, we need your help.” The sender identified himself as an Eritrean refugee who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months, locked in one big hall with hundreds of others. Now, the city around them was crumbling in a scrimmage between warring factions, and they remained stuck, defenseless, with only one remaining hope: contacting her. Hayden had inadvertently stumbled onto a human rights disaster of epic proportions. From this single message begins a staggering account of the migrant crisis across North Africa, in a groundbreaking work of investigative journalism. With unprecedented access to people currently inside Libyan detention centers, Hayden’s book is based on interviews with hundreds of refugees and migrants who tried to reach Europe and found themselves stuck in Libya once the EU started funding interceptions in 2017. It is an intimate portrait of life for these detainees, as well as a condemnation of NGOs and the United Nations, whose abdication of international standards will echo throughout history. But most importantly, My Fourth Time, We Drowned shines a light on the resilience of humans: how refugees and migrants locked up for years fall in love, support each other through the hardest times, and carry out small acts of resistance in order to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear.

Download or read book Down and Out written by Daniel Lavelle and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2022-05-26 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once a powerful memoir, unflinching polemic and probing investigation into modern homelessness in the UK, by award-winning investigative journalist Daniel Lavelle Daniel Lavelle left care at the age of nineteen, and experienced homelessness for the first time not long after. So began a life spent navigating social services that were not fit for purpose, leaving Daniel and many like him slipping through the cracks. In Down and Out, Daniel draws on his own experiences - as well as those of the witty, complex, hopeful individuals he has encountered who have been shunned or forgotten by the state that is supposed to provide for them - in order to shine a powerful light on this dire situation. Down and Out is a true state-of-the-nation examination of modern homelessness: assessing its significance, its precursors and causes, as well as the role played by government, austerity, charities, and other systems in perpetuating this crisis. Ultimately, it seeks to ask how we as a society might change our practices and attitudes so that, one day, we can bring this injustice to an end.

Download or read book Spring written by Ali Smith and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Man Booker Prize Finalist comes the third novel in her Seasonal Quartet—a New York Times Notable Book and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2020 What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times? Spring. The great connective. With an eye to the migrancy of story over time and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare's most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tell the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown, Smith opens the door. The time we're living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story? Hope springs eternal.

Download or read book The Windrush Betrayal written by Amelia Gentleman and published by Guardian Faber Publishing. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searing portrait of Britain's hostile environment by the celebrated journalist, longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2019.

Download or read book Godforsaken Idaho written by Shawn Vestal and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nine stories illuminate what it means to be Mormon and how faith serves to humanize, in a work that includes a seriocomic portrait of a young Joseph Smith.