"Why I Write": Orwell Prize finalists respond to Orwell's famous question
Hear from the finalists for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing and The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2024
The winners of the 2024 Orwell Prizes will be revealed at a special event in London this Thursday 27 June. Ahead of the announcement, we asked the finalists for The Orwell Prizes for Political Writing and Political Fiction for their responses to Orwell’s famous essay ‘Why I Write’.
George Orwell wrote that writers have four ‘great motivations’ (putting aside the need to earn a living): sheer egoism; aesthetic enthusiasm; historical impulse; and political purpose. Which of these speak to you? Why do you write?
Orwell had it right: these motivations are present – consciously or otherwise – in all writers. But I would say my own drive is simpler: I write to make sense of the world. Our days are filled with stimulus – sonic and optic bedlam, too much for anyone to process. When faced with this blitz, I often find myself at a loss to respond quickly or in a meaningful way. It is later – often much later – usually in the quiet of my office, amidst the clutter of my desk, that I start to put things together. When I write, I feel ideas congeal and take shape; I find myself homing in on the sticky issues – points of moral or political conflict; shades of character. Absent the keyboard (or pencil or pen), ideas flit in and out; they are all circumstance and ephemera. I never know which insights to hold to. That is, until I write them down: wild and unruly in the first instance; careful and considered (I hope) in the second. In this way, for me at least, to write is to think. They are but two expressions of this call towards understanding – of positioning the self in the world, and the world in the self. Perhaps this is what Orwell captured with his ‘great motivations’ too.
Matthew Longo, The Picnic
Probably 'sheer egoism' and 'aesthetic enthusiasm' come the closest. Sheer egoism - the need and desire to write for its own sake and as a very enjoyable way of spending time, and also to serve some purpose still mysterious to me but which I think is to do with mental processing. It isn't that I write to understand myself or the world as such, but just to parse my experience of being alive in the way dreams can. Writing and dreaming feel like very similar things to me. As for aesthetic enthusiasm, I love making sentences. Sentences are little machines that do the parsing. The more precise and illuminated you can make them, the better they are at that mystical dream-work, and the better they are at turning private experience into shared experience, and opening up common space between us.
Samantha Harvey, Orbital
The bird sings, the wasp weaves its web, I write. For whatever reason, writing has become for me the most natural mode of expression.
Hisham Matar, My Friends
I write to try and understand and in the faith that others want to understand too. Sometimes, I flatter myself and imagine that I am following Orwell’s lead when he writes: “every line of serious work that I have written...,directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understood it.” Most of the time, I regret that we lack his clarity.
Lyndsey Stonebridge, We Are Free to Change the World
The first time I read “Why I Write”, I didn't pay much heed to Orwell's schematic of four "great motivations." I was young, and held as a certainty that all art was political, especially that which claimed otherwise. The line that did strike me was from later in the essay, Orwell says of "the great mass" of human beings: “After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery.” I was very broke, working shit jobs and teeming with a young person's anger and vitality. In those days, I was always listening out for confirmation of my own suspicions, the endless drudgery, the loss of self, that lie ahead. And yet, alongside those enormous stores of class rage and political outrage, I held enormous, profound, enthusiasm for art and literature and radical politics, and for queer culture especially.
Reading the essay again, all these years later, I'm even less convinced of the utility of grand generalities - in fact, on the whole I find myself less certain, more curious. When Orwell breaks down writerly motivation into sheer egoism, historical impulse, political purpose, and aesthetic enthusiasm, why those categories? And why pair those adjectives with those particular nouns? Why not political enthusiasm, aesthetic impulse? My own temptation is to uncouple the adjectives and focus on the nouns: ego, impulse, purpose, and enthusiasm. Arranged in that order they almost feel like a plot. Again, I am reminded of the very young man I once was, governed by all sorts of impulses: political, historical, aesthetic. Marshalling those impulses, the destructive and appreciative, into a sense of artistic purpose proved extremely difficult work. But the energy to do so, the enthusiasm was there. Now in my mid-forties, when my country is funding and arming a genocide in Gaza, when the election rhetoric is all feckless neoliberalism and fascistic manipulations, I find artistic enthusiasm harder to maintain. This is an acutely enraging and maddening time, but one that also feels eerily familiar, cyclical, and somehow doubly exhausting. There's a temptation to scoff at artmaking, at lofty ideas; another temptation is to succumb to hopelessness. For inspiration, for the necessary enthusiasm, I find myself looking in two directions at once, at the admirable activism and the energy of the young, and at the older generations as well, and the work they've left behind, little known histories of resistance. I suppose I'm always searching for those who figured out a way to keep working and reading and resisting over the long haul, and to never “abandon the sense of being an individual”, as Orwell puts it.
Blackouts, my novel, is about many things, but one of the main themes is just this: the dialogue between youth and wisdom, or what might be possible and what has been made possible, the ways in which new imaginings of the past and future might sustain us in the now.
Justin Torres, Blackouts
What most speaks to me is Orwell's category of historical impulse, though I would destabilise his idea of a desire to find out "true facts." There are some realms of enquiry, especially in social history, when the hard, cold facts are of almost secondary importance. Myths, local legends, gossip, rumours are almost irrelevant to fact, and yet they can speak to deeper truths, perceptions and realities - it is that meaning, that pursuit of what has mattered to people and how they have interpreted the events they have witnessed and lived through, which motivates me to write.
Jason Okundaye, Revolutionary Acts
I write because it's the activity that helps me learn about the world and myself. Actually, it's the activity that reaffirms my belief that I really don't know much.
Percival Everett, James
The Incarcerations (and my earlier book Nightmarch) were above all about political purpose and historical impulse – because there were lies to expose, buried facts to draw attention to, a history of injustice to be recorded in the hope of making new and better futures. But there was also an abiding sense of the need to turn the writing into art, an aesthetic experience that may move people all over the world into caring about the incarcerated intellectuals and activists I was writing about and their fight for democracy and justice. I also recognised that I wrote from a position of privilege – based in an elite British university - and it made me feel a moral duty to tell the story of my incarcerated colleagues back in India, to challenge the oppressive regimes that had incarcerated them, with my scholarship, investigation and good writing that matters for humanity as a whole. I acutely felt how times of repression, oppression, and control can also turn into moments of spectacular, resistant creativity. It is time to seize the moment and reshape our futures. Our writing can be our weapon.
Alpa Shah, The Incarcerations
“Everyone has his own conscience,” Hemingway said, “and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function.” I don’t believe Orwell was advocating a marshalling of minds when he spoke of writing as a political art form. I write, as I think he did, to create moral entertainment. It should replenish the imagination and be a provocative device at the centre of one's complacency, operating magically in terms of style. Good writing is not an argument: it is political in a deeper, more sublime way, enriching the emotional lives of the audience in ways that are powerful and surprising. That’s why I do it. To reach people.
Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road
This book was a departure from my normal mode of writing, which mixed history, analysis, argument, and reportage. At the outset, I decided that this book would be something entirely different, a work of pure narrative, aimed at reaching people not just cerebrally but viscerally. I had concluded that a change in political opinion could be deeper and stronger if it was rooted in a changed feeling. And to best achieve that changed feeling one needs to craft a work that is as attentive to its aesthetics as to its politics. These are the two core principles that guide my writing.
Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
I write because I hope to be useful. It’s also true that I’m aesthetically excitable, but for the primary urge, yes—to be useful.
Cat Bohannon, Eve
All of them do. Of course, I cringe a little at the idea of “sheer egoism,” but it does take some ego to imagine/anticipate that your craft and world perspective are important enough to be shared, to be discussed, to possibly make a difference, to echo in some cases the concerns and perspectives of others. Aesthetic enthusiasm – absolutely. For me, aesthetics as related to the crafting and “performance” of language is huge. More specifically, I think Caribbean languages are beautiful and by their very existence speak to a people’s determination to survive and shape their world. I am fascinated by the way African and Asian people were - in the 19th century, on a continent away from the original spaces of their ancestors - forcibly introduced to English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and were able to craft new languages out of those. I am pulled to both admiration and impulse to investigate and record by the tensions involved in the wrestling with those languages and crafting something new. All of that suggests to me performance, which is perhaps one reason that I am interested in both print and performance. There’s the craft and the story that the crafting can tell. This, in a sense, takes us to how politics and history underlie all of that - historical impulse - peoples in the Caribbean who are African, Asian, French, English, Dutch, Portuguese. Orwell is correct. Both historical impulse and political purpose are embedded there. I completely agree with Orwell’s perspective that “the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” For me, there is no way to simply enjoy languages without also thinking about the turbulent history and politics that produced them.
Merle Collins, Ocean Stirrings
This may come under political impulse, but for me the sheer need to bear witness drives the writing. It is intolerable to see reality that I am familiar with to be so misunderstood and sometimes deliberately distorted when I have so much first-hand knowledge to share. That is especially the case with covering wars, where truth, as is often said, becomes the first casualty.
Yaroslav Trofimov, Our Enemies Will Vanish
All these motivations speak to me. But I think there might be something even deeper. The artist Robert Filiou came up with this wonderful sentence: Art is what makes life more interesting than art. That’s how I feel about writing. It brings life back to life.
Adam Thirlwell, The Future Future
"Orwell Daily is a lovely use of Substack, finding the best pieces from his archive and making them available online” - Helen Lewis
These are excellent insights. Thanks for sharing. I'll go back and read "Why I write," again. (Not that I needed much of an excuse).