NUJ celebrates Orwell Society’s award-winning young journalists

BBC journalist Anna Lamche and student editor Joseph Rodgers have won the 2025 Orwell Society/NUJ Young Journalists Award.

Lamche won the review category for ‘Inside the dream machine’, while Rodgers won the political column category for ‘Was it all just a vibe?’.

The two writers’ works explore Orwellian themes such as social alienation and the distortion of language. Lamache elucidates the distraction, dissociation, and dread of living in the digital world through an analysis of Vincenzo Latronico’s 2022 novel Perfection. Rodgers highlights both the couching of destructive far-right politics in euphemistic terms, and the superficiality of corporate commitments to ‘progressivism’.

Entries were judged by an expert panel that included: Hardeep Matharu, Byline Times editor; Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, gal-dem editor-in-chief; Tam Hussein, award-winning investigative journalist; Dorian Lynskey, author of The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984; and Bea Bennett, NUJ senior campaigns and communications officer. The panel was chaired by Dr Jaron Murphy, a consultant for the Orwell Society and academic at Bournemouth University.

The Young Journalists Award recognises the writing of journalism students or working journalists aged 30 or under. Having graduated from University College London in English Literature, Lamche now works for the BBC as a news and feature writer as well as a video-producer. Rodgers studies politics, philosophy and economics at University of Oxford, where he is also editor-in-chief of student paper Isis Magazine. The runners-up were masters student Sunny Sunday for her review of Peter Hujar’s photo exhibition, and freelance researcher Joshua Shortman for his column on conspiracy paper The Light.

George Orwell was a proud NUJ member. You can read the winning submissions of both Lamche and Rodgers on the Orwell Society website.

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