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Inside Housing journalist wins Orwell Prize
An Inside Housing journalist has won the prestigious Orwell Prize for political writing.
Peter Apps, deputy editor, picked up the accolade for his book Show Me the Bodies: How we Let Grenfell Happen, which covers the build-up to the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire.
He picked up the award from a total of nine finalists.
Mr Apps thanked a number of people on Twitter, including his publisher Oneworld Publications, before adding: “I’m grateful to so many people, but particularly those from the community who trusted me to tell their stories. I hope I have done them justice.
“The point of the book is to help people understand that Grenfell was a crime – a result of a series of specific choices by specific people and the entirely avoidable result of a political ideology that valued the lives of poorer people below the opportunity of companies to profit.
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“Six years on, the community is still waiting for justice for those choices and real change to that ideology. They need people not to forget about what happened and to remain angry about it. If we let it get brushed under the rug it will be.”
Jack Simpson, former assistant editor (news and investigations), was also highly commended at the awards ceremony on Thursday for his work investigating the exempt accommodation scandal.
The Orwell Prize is one of the UK’s most important awards for writing. Named after George Orwell, and run by The Orwell Foundation, it seeks to honour works which meet the author’s ambition “to make political writing into an art”.
Martin Hilditch, editor of Inside Housing, said: “I’m delighted to see Pete get such prestigious recognition for his book, Show Me the Bodies, which tells such a powerful and important story and exposes in detail what went wrong and why it was avoidable.
“Pete worked so incredibly hard, outside of the day job, to tell this story and to tell it well, and I hope that winning such a high-profile award will help his work reach a new audience and continue the fight to make sure a disaster like Grenfell can never happen again. It is an important and compelling read and I would encourage any of our readers who haven’t already to pick up a copy.”
He added: “I’m so pleased to see Jack Simpson get highly commended by the Orwell Prize for his work in reporting on homelessness. Jack is an incredible journalist and his agenda-setting work on problems with exempt accommodation has helped to increase scrutiny of an often overlooked and little understood part of the housing system.”
