Hisham Matar wins Orwell prize for political fiction

The Pulitzer winner’s third novel My Friends is based on an event from 1984, when officials opened fire on protesters at the Libyan embassy in London

Pulitzer prize winner Hisham Matar has won this year’s Orwell prize for political fiction for his third novel My Friends, which follows three Libyan exiles in London.

Matthew Longo won the nonfiction counterpart – the Orwell prize for political writing – for The Picnic, about a group of Hungarian activists who staged a pan-European summer party near the militarised Austrian border in August 1989. During the picnic, 600 East Germans breached the border unhindered by guards – an event which came to be seen as a catalyst for the fall of the Berlin wall.