The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity. We use Orwell's remarkable legacy to celebrate honest writing and reporting, uncover hidden lives, confront uncomfortable truths and, through the Orwell Youth Prize, to encourage all young people to think and write creatively and critically.
The Orwell Youth Prize is an annual writing prize for young people in secondary school in the UK, using the writings of George Orwell as a starting point to encourage entrants to write critically and creatively about the world around them. The Prize encourages entries in all forms of writing - articles, stories, poetry, essays, scripts and even video game design!
This year's theme is 'Home'. At a time when our idea of home seems under pressure, from the cost-of-living crisis and the housing crisis, to the plight of refugees and the climate crisis, we want to encourage young people to write about what home means to them.
Inspired by Orwell, we want our entrants to think about ideas of home today. What does it feel like to be at home? What happens when our sense of a safe and secure home comes under threat? And how can we make our homes the places we want them to be – be this a household, town, city, country, or the world?
Uniquely, we offer all our entrants personalised feedback, which is made possible by our brilliant network of volunteer readers, who come from across the fields of publishing, literature, academia, civil society and more. Everyone who enters before our feedback deadline of Monday 1st April 2024 is offered feedback, and a chance to submit a new draft by our final deadline of Monday 6th May 2024.
Please contact The Orwell Youth Prize Programme Coordinator, Tabby Hayward, at [email protected] for more informaiton and to get involved.