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Orwell Society/ NUJ Young Journalists’ Award


Anna Lamche, winner of the review category, writes for this month’s edition.


I


was reading the NUJ magazine in January when I saw a short notice calling for entrants to the Orwell Society/NUJ Young Journalists Award. It was


printed beneath a news story on “yet another wave” of job cuts at the BBC, where I currently work. It was against this backdrop that I chose to enter the Orwell Society/ NUJ Young Journalists Award. Te prize offered an exciting opportunity to return to review writing aſter a year or so of focusing mainly on hard news. Working as a journalist has always been a precarious business, and, as ever, it’s good to have multiple strings to one’s bow. Te year 2025 brings its own unique set of challenges for any young journalist trying to make their way in London. Unlike the city a young Geoff Dyer encountered in the 1980s, where “the newspapers were geting thicker and thicker” with supplements and “living cheaply” was still possible*, our capital is now a hostile environment for many without wealth or family roots.


Add to this the many changes in


the way humans access, gather and distribute information in recent years. With the advent of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) technology, news media is on the cusp of yet another “information revolution”, as the systems theorist Nafeez Ahmed puts it. AI is already profoundly altering the way many news organisations work – including the adoption of so-called ‘AI-assisted reporters’ by some publishers. In this context of rapid change, perhaps the key for a young journalist is to pursue what they love. Tat’s why I entered the Young Journalists Award with my review of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection. Tis slim, genre-bending book – an essay masquerading as fiction


– offers as acute a portrait of the texture of 21st century modernity as any I have encountered. Latronico’s work tells the story of Anna and Tom, a couple living in Berlin in the 2010s who are forever distracted by the relentless flow of images on the “glaring rectangle” of their screens. Te writer makes use of the idea of the “digital nomad” to probe the spiritual vacuum underlying the experience of a life lived mainly online. Anna and Tom may offer extreme examples of the alienation and dissatisfaction that results from this way of relating to the world – but most readers will feel flickers of recognition as they make their way through Latronico’s spare and exacting prose.


Tough it made me squirm, the book was a pleasure to read and the review was a pleasure to write. In my lifetime, I expect the media will evolve in many new and surprising ways. It is my – perhaps wilfully


naive – hope that the pursuit of pleasure through my work will act as a reliable


guiding principle as I navigate the industry through its changes in the years to come. *Geoff Dyer interviewed on the Always Take Notes podcast.


Read Anna’s review htps://orwellsociety.com/ bursary/2025-winners-ii- inside-the-dream-machine/


AWARD


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