Judging chair calls Lerner’s novel a ‘funny, brainy and timely’ study of our appetite for technology, while Karen Bartlett wins the nonfiction prize for The Escape from Kabul

American writer Ben Lerner has won this year’s Orwell prize for political fiction for Transcription, a novel exploring technology and memory.

In nonfiction, the prize went to Karen Bartlett for The Escape from Kabul, which looks at Afghan women lawyers who came under threat after the fall of Kabul in 2021.

Mentions of reading in Tinder bios are up 29% in the last year. But is searching for a fellow fan of one’s favourite author really a shortcut to compatibility?

‘One of my Hinge prompts is: ‘What’s the best book you read this year?’ and I swipe left on anyone who says a book I don’t like,” says 29-year-old Ayo*. “Someone once replied with a book by Jordan Peterson, which was a massive ick.”

It’s a blunt approach to romance, but Ayo is far from alone. Books have long functioned as cultural shorthand for personality – signals of taste and worldview – but dating apps have accelerated and intensified that process. In an attention economy that rewards speed, these signifiers have to be legible at a glance.