Spotlighting Exceptional Human Rights Writing:

The 2026 Moore Prize Long-list

The Christopher G. Moore Foundation is delighted to announce the long-list for the 2026 Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing. The nine books selected this year are distinguished by their ambitious, courageous, and original engagement with some of the most pressing human rights issues facing the world today. Each title has been recognised for both the importance of its subject matter and the excellence of its writing.

The long-listed titles for the 2026 Moore Prize are:

• The Jailhouse Lawyer by Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull (Penguin Press)

• A Historian in Gaza by Jean-Pierre Filiu, translated by Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous (Context/Westland Press)

• A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America by Trymaine Lee (St. Martin's Publishing Group)

• The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet by Yi-Ling Liu (Ithaka Press)

• The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth by Nicolas Niarchos (Penguin Press/William Collins)

• Blood Will Flow: The Murderous Business of Oil and Gas by Alex Perry (Ithaka Press)

• World of War Crimes: Eyeless in Gaza and Beyond by Geoffrey Robertson KC (Biteback Publishing)

• For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran's Women-Led Uprising by Nilo Tabrizy and Fatemeh Jamalpour (Atlantic Books)

• Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century by Ece Temelkuran (Canongate Books)

Together, these long-listed works examine a broad spectrum of twenty-first-century human rights concerns, including war crimes, racial violence, internet censorship and surveillance, the suppression of women's rights, displacement and dispossession, criminal justice, and the violent pursuit of oil, gas, and critical minerals. The books explore social, economic, and political human rights abuses in China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gaza, Iran, Mozambique, Turkey, and the United States.

Christopher G. Moore, Founder of the Foundation, said:

“The 2026 long-list is the most geographically and thematically wide-ranging in the Prize's history. What is striking is that many of these books track the same pressure: the scramble for resources including oil, gas, cobalt, lithium while the human cost is buried inside supply chains the world prefers to ignore. That is new territory for this Prize, and it reflects where the human rights conversation has moved. Alongside it, you have writers bearing first-hand witness from Gaza, Iran, and Louisiana. The range of forms is as striking as the range of subjects: a former prisoner, a war crimes judge, an exiled journalist, a photographer, a mitigation specialist. Human rights writing, this year, arrives from inside the experience."

Established in 2015, the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing supports authors whose work advances the universality of human rights and brings greater attention to issues of justice, freedom, and human dignity. Awarded annually by an independent panel of judges whose professional work centres on human rights, the Prize seeks to amplify important voices and foster public engagement with critical global issues.

The jury for the 2026 Moore Prize comprises Patricia Gossman, Senior Associate Director for the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch; Keith B. Richburg, member of the Editorial Board and Global Opinions columnist for The Washington Post; and Ambika Satkunanathan, a Sri Lankan human rights advocate and former Commissioner of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka.

The short-list will be announced on Tuesday, 10 November 2026, and the winner will be announced on Wednesday, 6 January 2027. The winner of the 2026 Moore Prize will receive £2,000.

Patricia Gossman is Senior Associate Director for the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch. Before joining Human Rights Watch, she served as Director of the Afghanistan Program at the International Centre for Transitional Justice and founded the Afghanistan Justice Project, an Open Society Foundations-funded initiative documenting war crimes committed during the Afghanistan conflict from 1978 to 2001. She previously served as Human Rights Watch's Senior Researcher for South Asia, covering Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. Dr. Gossman holds a doctorate in South Asian Studies from the University of Chicago and has published extensively on human rights issues in the region.

Keith B. Richburg is a member of the Editorial Board and a Global Opinions columnist for The Washington Post. A veteran journalist and foreign correspondent with more than 35 years at the newspaper, he has reported from Asia, Africa, and Europe and has served as Foreign Editor. He is the author of Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa and currently resides in Bangkok, Thailand.

Ambika Satkunanathan is a human rights advocate based in Sri Lanka. From 2015 to 2020, she served as a Commissioner of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, where she led the country's first national study of prisons. Prior to that, she spent eight years as a Legal Adviser to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

She currently serves on the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture, the Executive Council of the World Organisation Against Torture, the Membership Council of Penal Reform International, the Network of Experts of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, and the Steering Committee of the Just Futures Collaborative. An Open Society Fellow from 2020 to 2022, she holds a BA and LLB from Monash University, Australia, and an LLM from the University of Nottingham, where she was a Chevening Scholar.