Shah is professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford and author of The Incarcerations, and Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerillas. Here she talks to journalist Nick Higham, who was the BBC’s first ever media correspondent and is a former presenter of Meet the Author on the BBC news channel.

Three finalists in this year’s Orwell Prizes come together at Foyles Charing Cross Road for a discussion about the art of political storytelling and the urgent themes raised in their shortlisted work.

Megan Nolan was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland. Her latest novel, Ordinary Human Failings, is set in nineties London and follows an ambitious reporter as he investigates an Irish family implicated in an atrocious crime. Ordinary Human Failings, also longlisted for the Women’s Prize, is shortlisted for the Orwell Foundation’s Political Fiction Book Prize.

Alpa Shah was raised in Nairobi, studied at Cambridge and completed her PhD at the LSE, where she now teaches anthropology. Her latest book, The Incarcerations, takes a shocking case of sixteen human rights defenders imprisoned in India without credible evidence or a trial, and unravels the larger state of democratic crisis in modern India. Shah’s work is shortlisted for the Orwell Foundation’s Political Writing Book Prize.

Yaroslav Trofimov is the chief foreign-affairs correspondent of The Wall Street Journal and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for two consecutive years, in 2022 and 2023. Our Enemies will Vanish, his expertly-told, eye-witness account of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is shortlisted for the Orwell Foundation’s Political Writing Book Prize.

The discussion will be chaired by journalist and author Christina Lamb, Chief Foreign Correspondent for the Sunday Times.

The event will be followed by a book signing. Doors will open from 6:45pm.