Meet our judges: Sukhdev Sandhu

"I long to find someone over here with whom I can discuss 'Boys' Weeklies' and swap favourite Billy Bunter lines."

Each year the Orwell Foundation awards prizes for the writing and reporting which best meet George Orwell’s ambition “to make political writing into an art”. Since the first annual Orwell Prizes were awarded in 1994, many distinguished figures from literature, journalism and public life have served on their judging panels: in this year alone, there are four independent panels across five prizes.

In this week’s interview, we spoke to Sukhdev Sandhu, a judge for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2023, about political writing, the role of the critic and George Orwell’s reputation in the United States.

Sukhdev Sandhu directs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University, runs the Texte und Töne publishing imprint, and is the author of London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined A City, Night Haunts, and Other Musics.

Since the establishment of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2019, the Orwell Prize for Political Writing has been awarded exclusively to a work of non-fiction. The finalists for this year’s prize will be announced in May 2023.

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To many people judging a book prize will seem like a daunting task. As a professional book critic, how are you finding the reading?

It's interesting to see how UK publishers understand 'political writing'. I've been reading memoirs, cultural histories, policy wonkery, journalistic exposes, cultural studies. Mostly I'm reminded of how time it takes to do serious research, to move beyond databases and official archives in order to track down people who don't always want to be found or to talk. Organisations that can fund deep-digging, periodicals that will publish stories which are not always topical or headline-grabbing, institutions and critical contexts that allow important books to get the attention they deserve: these are both hard to find and sorely needed.

What does good political writing mean to you? 

In Britain, I immediately think Ken Worpole, Jeremy Seabrook, Patrick Wright, Aditya Chakrabortty, Madeleine Bunting, James Meek, Ian Jack (RIP). It means writing that smells of shoe leather and street-pounding. That is free of platitudes, PowerPoint-pomposity, self-aggrandisement. That gets out of the metropolis, is interested in infrastructures, has long memories. That has texture and melody, ache, droll humour.

The role of the critic in publishing is a curious one, part deep-reading/thinking about a book, and part outsourced publicity (and often both). What do you feel your role in the culture is, or ideally would be?

Oh goodness. Authors work really hard on researching and writing books, getting them accepted and published, and then ... a sort-of silence descends. It sometimes seems people are too busy writing their own books to have time to read those of others. So the basics of what a critic does - read, ponder, give shape to that pondering - is still valuable to authors (and to readers, of course.) Critics can be many things - archaeologists, torch bearers, semi-licensed vandals. They can flag up writers, champion small imprints, undelete obscured vanguards, draw connections between traditions, cock a snook at fashion, function as termite enclaves within the papers or websites they work for, pen entertaining prose.

You’re based in the US—how do you feel Orwell is perceived as a writer and a political figure in the states?

There are many Orwells in the U.S. Along with the likes of Salinger, Steinbeck, Ellison and Harper Lee, he's a staple of high-school syllabi. For some on the haughty Right, he's an anti-Communist crusader; for some on the Left, he speaks 'truth to power'. He's often championed as a patron saint of 'proper' prose - prose that is uncontaminated by 'theory', 'acadamese', France. His essays and travel writing - The Road to Wigan Pier, Down and Out in Paris and London - are far less read than Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. I long to find someone over here with whom I can discuss 'Boys' Weeklies' and swap favourite Billy Bunter lines.