The Moore Prize
2025
The Moore Prize 2025 Winner for Writing on Human Rights
Looking at Women Looking at War – A War and Justice Diary by Victoria Amelina
When the war in Ukraine began in 2022, novelist Amelina was working on a new book. Overnight, she became a chronicler of the war and of the courageous women who, like herself, joined the resistance. She travelled the country documenting the effects of war through photographs of ruined homes, schools and community buildings, and recorded testimonies of eyewitnesses and survivors of the atrocities.
Her own death came while on a research trip in Donetsk region, when a Russian cruise missile fell on a restaurant where she and others were having dinner. Her collection of interviews, diary entries, audio files and notes to complete the book was used by friends and colleagues to prepare the unfinished manuscript for publication. The result is an extraordinary account of the horrors of war, the cost of resistance and of women as agents of change. Looking at Women Looking at War is an important document for future justice and future generations.
The Moore Prize 2025 Honourable Mention
The Many Lives of Syeda X by Neha Dixit
An examination of the life of an ordinary, working-class Muslim woman in modern India. Syeda’s story is told through her 50 different jobs across 30 years of constant corrosive tension. Her many challenges illustrate the universality of the human rights abuses that much of the world’s population face in their daily lives.
The Many Lives of Syeda X tells the story of the invisible people in India who are the backbone of society. Dixit immersed herself in Syeda’s life for many years while researching the book. The result is an immensely readable work of narrative non-fiction that draws the reader into Syeda’s life and family, as she navigates ingrained hardships that have affected generations of those at her level of society in the world’s largest democracy.
The Moore Prize 2025 Short List
Prosecuting the Powerful – War Crimes and the Battle for Justice by Steve Crawshaw
Crawshaw turns the lens toward accountability itself, tracing the difficult, dangerous pursuit of justice against those who wield authority without restraint.
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove – China’s Stolen Children and a Story of Separated Twins by Barbara Demick
The haunting legacy of China’s stolen children and the human cost of state control over identity and family.
2025 Judges
Clare Hammond
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
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
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.