Kenan Malik’s From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Aftermath (forthcoming in June from Melville House) has been longlisted for the George Orwell Book Prize. The award is “the pre-eminent British prize for political writing” that is “judged to have best achieved George Orwell’s aim to ‘make political writing into an art’.”

Malik’s book examines how radical Islam has gained hold in Muslim communities, how multiculturalism contributed to this, and how the Salman Rushdie affair transformed the very nature of the debate on tolerance and free speech. The  shortlist for the prize will be announced on April 15 and the winner on May 19.