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.

Alpa Shah who is award-winning of author of The Incarcerations, is currently a Professor of Anthropology at London School of Economics and will be the next Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford University with a Fellowship at All Souls College.

Sushant Singh, Lecturer at the South Asian Studies Council of Yale University, will introduce the discussion.

Location: Amphithéâtre Erignac - 13, rue de l'Université - 75007 Paris

2024 is a year of elections around the world, with record numbers of first time voters and almost half the global population casting their votes. Yet each nation has its own shifting concept of what the democratic process entails. A distinguished panel scrutinises the civic attitudes and constitutional safeguards that ensure true democracy.

Part of the Jaipur Literary Festival which runs from the 7th to the 9th of July 2024.