Announcing the Long List for the 2025 Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing 

The Christopher G. Moore Foundation is delighted to announce an exciting Long List of nine books that are outstanding in their portrayal of human rights themes. The trustees of the Foundation considered 70 titles submitted for the Prize this year.  Each of the long-listed books displays a high quality of writing and an impressive degree of ambition, courage and insight, opening a window on crucial human rights issues across the world.

The 2025 long-listed titles are as follows (alphabetical by surname):

• Looking at Women Looking at War – A War and Justice Diary by Victoria Amelina (William Collins)

• Prosecuting the Powerful – War Crimes and the Battle for Justice by Steve Crawshaw (Little Brown)

• Daughters of the Bamboo Grove – China’s Stolen Children and the Story of Separated Twins by Barbara Demick (Granta)

• The Many Lives of Syeda X – A People’s History of Invisible India by Neha Dixit (Footnote Press)

• Anywhere But Here – How Britain’s Broken Asylum System Fails Us All by Nicola Kelly (Elliott and Thompson Ltd)

• An Inconvenient Place by Jonathan Littell and Antoine d’Agata; Translated by Charlotte Mandell (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

• Radio Free Afghanistan – A Twenty-Year Odyssey for an Independent Voice in Kabul by Saad Mohseni with Jenna Krajeski (William Collins)

• Every Body Counts – Money, Lies and the Hidden Trade in Human Lives by Barbie Latza Nadeau (Ithaca)

• Same River, Twice – Putin’s War on Women by Sofi Oksanen; Translated by Owen F. Witesman (HarperVia, HarperCollins)

The long-listed books cover a wide range of human rights issues, some local, some pan-global:  refugees and asylum, the prosecution of war criminals, the devastation of lives during war, international trafficking of people, children, human organs and drugs and the constant struggle of life lived in extreme poverty and discrimination. The books span a range of global settings: Afghanistan, China, India, Russia, Ukraine and the UK.

Foundation founder, Christopher G. Moore says:

“Human rights protection has been under increased threat in many countries in 2024. This year has seen a further erosion of the consensus of the importance of human rights at the political leadership level. Reading the submitted titles shows that authors, editors and publishers are not remaining silent.  Their call – often from the frontline – is the canary in civilization’s coal mine. Social media, journalists, academics and human rights frontline workers are essential partners in the struggle to call attention to the lives of people stripped of hope, dignity and value. A book can change a perception, it can change a life and it can make a difference.  Please help spread the word to encourage friends and colleagues to read the books on the list.”

The Moore Prize was established in 2015 to provide funds to authors who, through their work, contribute to the universality of human rights and to give a platform to human rights issues that are important in our current societies. 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.

The shortlist will be announced on Wednesday, 12 November, 2025 and the winning book on Wednesday, 7 January, 2026. The winner of the prize will receive £1,000. 

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.