Transcription by Ben Lerner wins Orwell prize for political fiction

Judging chair calls Lerner’s novel a ‘funny, brainy and timely’ study of our appetite for technology, while Karen Bartlett wins the nonfiction prize for The Escape from Kabul American writer Ben Lerner has won this year’s Orwell prize for political fiction for Transcription, a novel exploring technology and memory. In nonfiction, the prize went to Karen Bartlett for The Escape from Kabul, which looks at Afghan women lawyers who came under threat after the fall of Kabul in 2021.