My Orwell Prize Shortlist Disappointment

It's the Hope That Kills You.

The exquisite irony of my first substack being about people judging my writing is one that is not lost on me.

You see, for the second time in my life I discovered yesterday that I hadn’t made the shortlist for the Orwell Prize. I applied two years ago for the Exposing Britain’s Social Evil award, with my work on my homeless experience in The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, my Tortoise Media Op Ed. and my academic writing in the British Academy’s Representing Homelessness index published by Oxford University Press.

Then I was competing against professional journalists; me, the guy experiencing homelessness, at that time for twelve years, against legendary industry stalwarts. But at least I felt I had a distinctive voice that stood out from the norm - well that was what all my editors were telling me. Clearly a distinctive voice isn’t really one that gets rewarded.

This time though, I thought I was up against my peers - other non-professional writing people experiencing homelessness finding different ways to tell their stories to try and accomplish change for no other reason than they were trying to convert their plights into something positive. The inaugural Orwell prize for Reporting Homelessness sponsored by the Centre for Homeless Impact seemed to be a different proposition entirely.

The description of the prize literally encapsulated everything I was doing:

“Items may be in any medium, such as written journalism or creative writing, video and audio content including video diaries, photojournalism (which must include text as well as photos) and social media content. Transcripts of audio or video work will not be required. Books are not eligible for the Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness.”

So when the gut punch of discovering I hadn’t made the cut yesterday subsided I looked at it objectively and was judging my own contribution the way I’d just judged a few weeks earlier, the 96 entries for the Non-Fiction section of the London Library Programme. I had to whittle them down to just six, as part of the judging process for this year’s Emerging Writers.

When I was doing that, it was surprising how easy it was to spot the diamonds in the rough - because most applications followed the same paths, I’m this, I’m that, I’m going to write for the exact same reasons as the previous twenty submissions you’ve just read said they would, but suddenly you come across one that doesn’t and boy do you get excited. You hope the associated writing submission shines as cleverly as the covering application did, some don’t, but most surpass expectations and I’m sure it is the same in judging the Orwell Prize.

I kept thinking, I mean how many people who are experiencing homelessness would have submitted a creative writing comicstirp (The Best Of Times, The Worst Of Times), a piece of data work on “Everyone In” for the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) (What Did Everyone In Teach Us About Homelessness) and a film documentary based on the same subject, made up of my video diary during the first three months of lockdown which was then turned into a fundraiser for the Museum of Homelessness and screened at the Genesis Cinema (90 Days Of Hope: Why Britain Chose Not To End Homelessness) on Mile End Road?

I wondered did the judges weight their scores somehow? Did they for instance say that a Journalist living in a house writing an article for money, scores a lesser value to someone writing on their laptop in the freezing entrance of an Airport Terminal having survived on three hours sleep there for the past four nights, simply to get their story published, with no financial reward whatsoever, or did they simply not take those factors into account at all?

And how do you compare like with like if you’re comparing writing to film to comicstrip in just one entry to people who’ve only submitted say just written work, or just audio work or just video work or only one work. Do the three talents outweigh the one?

Now, I’m not coming at this with some kind of inflated ego, I’m just truly intrigued as to why I didn’t make the last nine especially upon discovering most of them are professional journalists, which felt like they’d been used to fill the slots because they’d not received enough entries from people experiencing homelessness.

This is after-all a prize for non journalists in the main, the entry explicitly said they were looking for people who were writing whilst experiencing homelessness and that any medium counted, especially as the Orwell Prize already has a prize that specifically covered professional journalists & another one for them writing about Exposing Britain’s Social Evils which would of course include homelessness and indeed one of the journalists selected for the shortlist for this prize made the cut for that one last year too. This award thereby gives professional journalists three bites of the cherry, whilst those experiencing homelessness only get one. It is the plight of our situation writ large. The deck is always stacked against you, when you’re absent of a home.

So would my submission have been weighted more heavily as I am currently homeless against those who were not and if so does that mean the judges deemed my work almost unintelligible?

Fortuitously, whenever I’ve doubted my own work or talent there’s always been someone to bolster me and I appreciate that luck hugely. For example, the greatest playwright of our generation, James Graham, encouraged me to keep writing plays just as I was about to pack it all in, when I wasn’t selected as part of his open call for his crowdsourced play Sketching in Wilton’s Music Hall in 2018 and hence why my play about my ongoing homelessness, Fifty Years of Trying, finally made it to the Camden People’s Theatre the night Boris Johnson closed theatres down for Lockdown on 16th March 2020.

My Comic Strip produced with Private Eye Magazine Cartoonist Mike Stokoe for the Pavement Magazine,which was part of my entry for this Orwell Prize, has been taken into the permanent collection of the Cartoon Museum, having been on display in the museum’s This Exhibition Is A Work Event: The Tale of Boris Johnson until this April (2023). A compare and contrast, Hogarthian tale of what it was really like to go through the process of being taken into housing through the “Everyone In” process, as opposed to what it could have been like, where every frame of it actually happened to me.

And thanks to programme manager Claire Berliner, I was selected as one of just 40 out of near 1,000 submissions for the London Library Emerging Writers programme in 2021 - 2022.

What the Orwell judges may not have picked up on is the bias in the Third Sector when it comes to someone being critical of it - or indeed they may be, or even be a party too.  The RSA editorial team changed my writing in the piece that I submitted for the prize, because the editor there had once worked for Shelter and felt that it was too negative about the charity, caveating my line “Shelter doesn’t have any, Crisis isn’t good in one” with what these homeless industry charities actually do - a  lobby group and a basic work skills institution respectively -  there by both missing the point of it entirely and at the same time underlining my case perfectly - she was more concerned about the perception of the brand than the actuality of the charity’s assistance to those it was created to serve, the very criticism my writing was making.

Unsurprisingly I’ve supported some of the professional writers who made the shortlist - when a member of the panel dropped out on the day of the Queen’s Death I  stepped in to help launch Vicky Spratt’s book Tenants, when Daniel Levelle asked if I’d speak at the launch of his work Down and Out I immediately replied in the affirmative, not that it happened.

Now it should be pointed out that the Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness, have rather bizarrely not placed the links to the published works of the Shortlist whether for writing, video, social media or audio, for us to see. The Judging Panel’s Chair, Alan Rusbridger mentioned Memoir in his quote - but we know that can’t be a book because books aren’t allowed in the category. So we await with bated breath to see what works are actually being compared here.

We also know that the Prize was particularly looking for people experiencing homelessness, yet of the contributors we can access through their social media handles of the nine, seven simply write or report about it professionally. Some have at least been homeless in one context or another in the past, but I’m hoping at least one person is writing about living the experience as I have been, but even that feels wrong, just one?

Frankly if I didn’t presently have the Publishing Director of Faber & Faber, Hannah Knowles currently helping me to secure an agent to help publish my memoir I may have ended it all yesterday, because to not have been shortlisted for the inaugural prize, when I matched the requirements of the prize so perfectly, was devastating

Now let's not get silly here though, I know from last time, that most people have no idea what the Orwell Prize is or that it even exists. So why should I care whether I’m shortlisted or not. Well it’s because other people in the arena I’m currently working in value it. It helps secure deals, gives weight to others, places more media pressure on public institutions like the DWP & the Local Authority.

As with last year's Museum & Heritage award, which thanks to the Museum of Homelessness, I got to carry away as part of the team that was working on the immersive experience Secret Museum, led to me doing some work with the RSC and meeting the Mayor of London’s Culture Ambassador, Bernard Donahughe. Though not even that was enough, as I thought he would immediately intervene and assist someone experiencing homelessness with the failings of Arts Council England when he discovered they’d issued me a grant for my street art project (Paul Atherton’s Displaced:Dispelling The Myths Of Homelessness) but didn’t provide the bank account they assured me they would and then illegally retracted their offer. but sadly he did not.

Equally, as I’ve been struggling for the past seven years waiting for the courts to assist me in getting my son’s £25,000 Trust fund back from the Trustee that stole it, the £3,000 prize money would have been life changing too.

The Arts Council England screw up as so far cost me around £50,000 and my Disability Benefit income from the DWP is currently incorrectly being paid at around £7 per day or in other words my annual income is £2,600. When a coffee costs £3.50 and laundry for the week £20.00 that’s clearly an unlivable amount for just day to day expenses, let alone anything else. So the prize money would have been truly invaluable.

It’s also the acknowledgement that in a world surrounded with pointless benefit bureaucracy, inhuman charity decision making and callous dereliction of duty from Local Authorities & Government Offices, that you can still shine, people can acknowledge your work and you can be made to feel human again.

I do wonder when organisations run things like this, whether they should do it in tandem with some kind of therapy support when dealing with, as they would put it, vulnerable groups.

Was I penalised because I crossed three genres? There was nothing in the rules saying I couldn’t. My writing and creativity was certainly of the appropriate standard, as mentioned above. I checked that collaboration with filmmakers and cartoonists was acceptable before submitting and was informed by the Orwell Prize’s admin team that it was fine as the creative content was all mine. But did that make it too complicated for judging? I suspect I’ll never find out.

I’ve spent my life surpassing the zeitgeist. I’m often judged by people who haven’t had a thousandth of my life experience and that’s been true since I was twelve years old. 

The last time I applied to the Orwell Prize I wrote on my blog about the disappointment of it all, this time I’m writing on Substack. Maybe here at least, I may find the feedback that I crave and am clearly not getting from the “establishment”.

Let me again use this fabulous quote from the great John Cleese in his movie Clockwise to condense my feelings into a single sentence:

“It’s not the despair Laura, I can handle the despair, it’s the hope I can’t stand.”