Awarded by The Orwell Foundation and named after George Orwell, the author of Nineteen-Eighty Four (1984), the seminal political novel about totalitarianism and the loss of personal freedom where the government controls every aspect of your lives. First given in 1994, the fiction and non-fiction were combined into one category from that date until 2018. Beginning in 2019 the political fiction was separated from the political writing (non-fiction).