Ukrainian novelist’s “Three Years on Fire” recognised for its testimony of life in wartime Kyiv, as the Orwell Foundation marks George Orwell’s birthday with its 2026 prize ceremony

Andrey Kurkov, widely regarded as Ukraine’s foremost living novelist, has been awarded a Special Prize by the Orwell Foundation for Three Years on Fire: The Destruction of Ukraine, the third volume in his acclaimed sequence of wartime diaries. The Special Prize, awarded only at the discretion of the judges and not given out every year, recognises work that the Foundation considers to embody George Orwell’s own ambition “to make political writing into an art” in an especially distinctive or urgent way.

The honour comes in addition to Three Years on Fire‘s place on the shortlist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2026, alongside seven other finalists. The winners of this year’s Orwell Prizes were celebrated at a ceremony at the Bloomsbury Theatre, University College London, on 25 June — held to coincide with George Orwell’s birthday and with UCL’s year-long bicentennial celebrations, UCL200.

Three Years on Fire is the third instalment of Kurkov’s ongoing chronicle of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, following his home city of Kyiv and his travels across the country through the third year of the war. Orwell Prize judge Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, described the collection as a series of moving and compelling essays that illuminate how Ukrainians have adapted to a conflict with no apparent end, paired with informed political analysis.

The book moves between the home front and the trenches, capturing what the Orwell Foundation has called the quiet rituals, unexpected humour and appalling losses of a nation in extended crisis — among them, a general’s elderly pet toad that becomes an unlikely emblem of defiance, and the recovery of a murdered writer’s diary from beneath a cherry tree. The volume closes in early 2025, against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the tense Oval Office exchange with President Volodymyr Zelensky in February of that year.

Reviewing the book for BookBlast, editor Georgia de Chamberet praised Kurkov’s gift for humanising his subjects without sentimentality, noting a dry, almost British humour reminiscent of Orwell, Amis or Waugh, which she described as a cultural pressure gauge for a society wrestling with instability and a long history of invasion, underpinned by a fierce instinct for survival.

Kurkov, who graduated from the Kyiv Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, is best known internationally for Death and the Penguin, his first novel translated into English and now in print in more than thirty languages. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, he has become one of the most prominent international chroniclers of the war, writing dispatches for newspapers and magazines worldwide and lecturing widely on the challenges facing his country.

Three Years on Fire is the third in a trilogy of war diaries that has followed Kurkov’s day-to-day observations since the invasion began. Speaking about the project, Kurkov has said he continues to keep the diary and to write essays drawn from it, seeking out the small, human stories that would not exist without the war — tracking how Ukraine has changed, and how he and his family have changed with it. He has described the undertaking as both a mission and a duty, one he says he will be glad to set down only once the war itself has ended.

The 2026 Orwell Prize for Political Writing shortlist was a notably international one, featuring Yi-Ling Liu’s The Wall Dancers, Nicolas Niarchos’s The Elements of Power, and Antonia Senior’s Stalin’s Apostles, among others. Rohan Silva, Chair of Judges for the Political Writing prize, said the shortlist engaged with the defining crises of the present era — from the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and the war in Ukraine to the enduring tragedy in Israel and Palestine — and that the judges had returned again and again to questions of clarity of prose and unflinching intellectual bravery in selecting their finalists.

The Orwell Prize, established in 1994 by the political theorist Sir Bernard Crick, is regarded as Britain’s most prestigious award for political writing. Its Special Prize has previously gone to recipients including Computer Weekly, for its sustained investigation of the Post Office Horizon scandal, underlining the judges’ willingness to use the award to honour work of singular public significance that may sit outside the bounds of the standard categories.

For Kurkov, the recognition adds to a body of work that has made him, in the words of one British reviewer, one of the most articulate ambassadors to the West for the situation in his homeland — a writer who has chosen to meet catastrophe with testimony, and testimony with art.

Three Years on Fire: The Destruction of Ukraine is published by Open Borders Press and is available through major retailers.

Eric A Opoku