The Moore Prize
2023
The Moore Prize 2023 Winner for Writing on Human Rights
Benjamin Black - Belly Woman: Birth, Blood & Ebola - The Untold Story
Belly Woman is a unique work combining investigative reporting and advocacy. A young doctor’s harrowing account of his experience in helping pregnant women give birth during an Ebola epidemic and Covid-19 pandemic. His book is set in Sierra Leone, 2014-2020. In 2014, when the author arrived, Sierra Leone was ranked the country with the highest death rate of pregnant women in the world. Dr. Black was forced to make impossible decisions on the maternity ward, facing moral dilemmas in the treatment centres, Belly Woman shines a light on an important story that has rarely surfaced on the literary radar screen.
Author Benjamin Oren Black is a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist in London and a specialist advisor to international aid organisations. Benjamin also teaches medical teams around the world on improving sexual and reproductive healthcare to the most vulnerable people in the most challenging of circumstances. In telling the story of the Ebola and Covid crises in Sierra Leone, Black wrote in a moving way about its victims, highlighting the voices of women, giving them agency. Their stories were interwoven to powerfully illustrate how a doctor in the field can practice medicine in ways that guide the advancement of global health and human rights. On a different level, he also showed the disparities between the global north and south through a human rights lens, reminding us that these health crises are not a new phenomenon, and that the international community has repeatedly been incapable of protecting human rights
The Moore Prize 2023 Special Prize for Young Authors
Yeva Skalietska - You Don’t Know What War Is: The Diary of a Young Girl from Ukraine
Yeva’s moving diary, written daily as she lived through the first 12 days after the Russian invasion, poignantly illustrates how the war changed her young life forever. Writing for children her own age, Yeva’s book exhibits a maturity of thought and writing ability that is far beyond her years, displaying compelling insight into what conflict is like through the eyes of a child. It is a story the world needs to hear and is essential reading for adults and older children alike. Her story is universal, one that applies as much to Gaza or any war, as it does to what’s happening in Ukraine. It is an extremely poignant, relevant book, written in a way that personalises the conflict – as Yeva and her family faced the terror of fleeing and sheltering from the bombing. We enter her world from a child’s point of view, a world of school, friends and family. You Don’t Know What War Is is a book that should be read and discussed by anyone who is interested in understanding the personal cost of current or future conflicts
The Moore Prize 2023 Honourable Mention
Antony Loewenstein - The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World
Loewenstein’s exposé documents the role of Israel’s military-industrial complex in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where they tested weaponry and surveillance technology. Having shown live data as to effectiveness, they exported this technology around the world, to despots and democracies alike. It is an important and powerful piece of on-the-ground reporting combined with extensive research about the world’s most dangerous region.
The Moore Prize 2023 Short List
Gaia Vince - Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval
An urgent and shocking analysis of how climate change will affect the world’s migration patterns.
Saket Soni - The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labour and Immigrant Dreams in America
Focusing on the plight of 500 Indian workers, this is an eye-opening story of the one of the largest human trafficking cases in modern American history and the workers’ heroic journey for justice.
Heriberto Araujo – Masters of the Lost Land: Murder and Corruption in the Amazon Rainforest
The gripping true story of the fight for human, economic and environmental justice raging in the heart of the Amazon rainforest.
2023 Judges
Geoffrey Robertson KC
Geoffrey Robertson KC has had a distinguished career as a trial counsel and human rights advocate. He has been a United Nations war crimes judge, a counsel in many notable trials, has defended hundreds of people facing death sentences in the Caribbean and has won landmark ruling on civil liberty from the highest courts in Britain, Europe and the Commonwealth. He is founder and joint head of Doughty Street Chambers, the largest human rights practice in Europe, a Master of the Middle Temple and a visiting professor at the New College of Humanities in London.
His books include Crimes Against Humanity, an inspiration for the global justice movement. Geoffrey’s many awards include a Freedom of Information award for his writing and broadcasting, the New York Bar Association’s Award for Distinction in International Laws and Affairs, and the Australian Humanitarian of the Year in 2014. In 2018 he was awarded an Order of Australia for “his distinguished service to the law and legal profession as an international human rights lawyer and advocate for global civil liberties”.
Dr Roja Fazaeli
Dr Roja Fazaeli is Professor in Islamic Civilisations and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. Roja has published widely on the subjects of Islamic feminisms, women religious authorities, woman’s rights in Iran and the relationship between human rights and religion. She is currently the chairperson of the board of directors of the Immigrant Council of Ireland and a member of the board of directors of Front Line Defenders, Scholars at Risk Europe and Iran Academia. Roja has been the Scholars at Risk representative at Trinity College since 2009 and was previously on the boards of the Irish Refugee Council, Azadi Andisheh (the Association for Freedom of Thought) and Amnesty International Ireland.
Dr Jacqueline Dugard
Dr Jacqueline Dugard is a senior lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Political Science, Columbia University. Prior to this, Jackie was an Associate Professor in the School of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she is now a Visiting Professor. She was a co-founder and the first Executive Director of the non-governmental organisation, Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa and the founding first Director of the Gender Equality Office at Witwatersrand. She is a Global Fellow at the Centre on Law and Social Transformation (U of Bergen, Norway), an Associate Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute and an Affiliate at the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University’s School of Law.