Announcing the 2025 Moore Prize Jury 

The Christopher G. Moore Foundation is delighted to announce the jury for their ninth annual literary prize honouring books that feature human rights themes. The Prize has been established to provide recognition to authors who, through their work, contribute to the universality of human rights. This unique initiative is awarded annually, as chosen by a panel of judges whose own work focuses on human rights.  

The 2025 Moore Prize jury is comprised of London-based investigative journalist Clare Hammond; Sydney-based Director of Human Rights Watch Asia Elaine Pearson; and Lithuanian former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to physical and mental health Dr Dainius Pūras. 

Clare Hammond  is a London-based investigative journalist. She works for non-profit Global Witness, where her reporting focuses on the intersection between natural resources, conflict and corruption. In Myanmar, where she worked for six years until 2020, she was most recently digital editor of investigative magazine Frontier Myanmar. There, she oversaw daily news coverage and set up a disinformation reporting unit. She also led the digital transformation of the newsroom, building a reader revenue programme that enabled the publication to survive the 2021 Myanmar coup. A Google News Initiative and Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting grantee, her work has won multiple awards. She is the author of On the Shadow Tracks: A Journey through Occupied Myanmar. 

Elaine Pearson is Human Rights Watch's Asia director, overseeing the work of the Asia division in more than 20 countries. She has conducted numerous human rights investigations in the Asia-Pacific region and around the world. Elaine writes frequently for a range of publications and her articles have appeared in the Guardian, Foreign Policy, and the Washington Post. She is on the board of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women.  Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Elaine worked for the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kathmandu, and London. Elaine is the author of Chasing Wrongs and Rights, published by Simon and Schuster in September 2022. 

Dr Dainius Pūras is professor of child and adolescent psychiatry and public mental health at Vilnius University, Lithuania. He is also a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Child Development Center of Vilnius University Hospital. Among positions he has held, Dainius was President of the Lithuanian Psychiatric Association, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Vilnius University, and Director of the Human Rights Monitoring Institute. During the years 2007-2011 he was a member of the UN Committee on the rights of the child. From 2014 till 2020 he served as a UN Special Rapporteur on the right to physical and mental health. 

Prize Founder Christopher G Moore says: “The 9th year of the Moore Prize features a jury of established human rights professionals, who bring to the judging task a wide range of knowledge, experience, and interest. Their influence and standing are recognised in the human rights community. Their commitment to communicating human rights violations and abuses aligns with the mission of the prize to support victims. Such a distinguished jury continues the Foundation’s founding commitment to engage global human rights leaders in the judging process." 

This year’s Prize will recognise books first published between 1 July, 2024 and 30 June, 2025. It is an international award which is open to authors worldwide. Entry is free and works may be submitted directly by the author(s) or through a publisher or agent. The Prize is open to any non-fiction work, published in or translated into English, which promotes the values of human rights. The winner of the prize will receive £1,000.  

The prize longlist will be announced on 11 June, 2025, the shortlist on 12 November, 2025 and the winner on 7 January, 2026.  

The 2024 Moore Prize was awarded to Waiting to Be Arrested at Night- A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. Freeman.