The Peter Davison Award 2023 Winner

The Trustees of The Orwell Society are proud to announce the winner of the Peter Davidson Award in the initial year of the Award:

Peter Stansky
Professor Emeritus of Stanford University

Background

The Peter Davison Award is a recognition of outstanding ability and contribution to the study of George Orwell, his life and his work. It is awarded by The Orwell Society no more than once a year to a person (or, unusually, a group of persons) who has or have produced and published (using “publication” in a wide sense) work of intellectual value comparable to that of Professor Davison.

Explanation

The judges considered Professor Stansky’s ground-breaking investigations and publications over fifty years, which have continued into the present day with the publication of The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War (Stanford University Press, 2023) and Twenty Years On: Views and Reviews of Modern Britain (Pinehill Humanities Press, 2020). Virtual meetings have allowed Professor Stansky (who is 91 in 2023) to remain a major contributor to discussions and colloquia on Orwell, permitting readers and students from around the world to interact with him.

In the early nineteen-seventies Professor Stansky and his partner William Abrahams narrowed their interest from writers on the Spanish Civil War to, specifically, George Orwell. At that time, while Orwell’s Collected Essays Journalism and Letters (1968) had been published in chronological order to give some sense of his life, no biography had appeared. Stansky and Abrahams took a detailed view and published, first, The Unknown Orwell (1972), and then Orwell: The Transformation (1979).

“What William Abrahams and I were concerned with in our two books was the making of Orwell, the artist and writer. We believed that Orwell’s caliber as an artist and as a writer was ultimately greater than his virtue”, Professor Stansky said in 2004, mentioning the diverging paths that critics have taken since in the discussion of George Orwell and his work. Nevertheless, most of these subsequent writers would have floundered had not Stansky and Abrahams’ two books cleared the way. William Abrahams died in 1998.

The Award 2023

Professor Stansky will receive £1000, and a trophy engraved on Welsh slate, mined close to the Vale of Ffestiniog where George Orwell and his son spent Christmas 1945 with Arthur Koestler and his wife.