Late Famed War Correspondent Nominated For Top Prize

[HuffingtonPost]

LONDON, April 18 (Reuters) - Veteran American war  correspondent Marie Colvin who was killed in Syria last year was  nominated on Thursday for the Orwell Prize, a British literary  award for political writing.                

Colvin, a U.S. reporter for Britain's Sunday Times  newspaper, was killed alongside French photographer Remi Ochlik  as Syrian government forces attacked the town of Homs in  February last year and rockets hit the house where they were  staying.                

"On the Front Line: The Collected Journalism of Marie  Colvin" was published in April last year. The book ends with her  final written dispatch from Homs.                

Colvin's book was one of seven shortlisted from 210  nominations for the Orwell book prize that was set up 10 years  ago to award work "that comes closest to George Orwell's  ambition to make political writing into an art".                

Prize director Jean Seaton said the judges started from   Orwell's injunction: "My starting point is always a feeling of  partisanship, a sense of injustice".                

"That is what the judges hunted for and found, writing that  was measured and calm not simply angry," Seaton said in a  statement.                

Colvin, 56, was one of 17 professional journalists and 44  citizen journalists killed in Syria last year, according to the  Paris-based rights group Reporters Without Borders.                

Also nominated for the prize that will be announced on May  15 was the "Occupation Diaries" by Palestinian lawyer and writer  Raja Shehadeh who won the Orwell book prize in 2008.                

British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith was  nominated for a second time, this time for his book "Injustice"  about the death penalty in the United States.                

The others shortlisted were Carmen Bugan with "Burying the  Typewriter" about growing up in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania, the  former Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway with "Leaving  Alexandria", Pankaj Mishra with "From the Ruins of the Empire",  and British law professor A.T. Williams with "A Very British  Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa".                

Six journalists were shortlisted from 155 nominations for  the year's journalism prize.                

They were Jamil Anderlini from the Financial Times, Tom  Bergin from Reuters, Ian Cobain of the Guardian, Andrew Norfolk  from The Times, Christina Patterson and Kim Sengupta from The  Independent.

Via: HuffingtonPost