Arkady Ostrovsky wins Orwell Prize

Arkady Ostrovsky, chief of The Economist’s Moscow bureau, has won the prestigious Orwell prize, the UK’s top award for political writing, for his book The Invention of Russia.

The book is an account of media manipulation in modern Russia tracing “the ideological conflicts, compromises and temptations” that have led the country from perestroika’s quest for freedom to recent conflicts in Ukraine.

Lord William Waldegrave, a judge for the prize, drew parallels between The Invention of Russia and George Orwell’s novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, adding that Ostrovsky’s book is “absolutely about the central themes that Orwell is most famous of all for … the importance of language, and how he or she who controls the language, controls the narrative”.

Source: The Guardian