My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Irish Book of the Year, Winner of the Orwell Prize and Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2022

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Both Sally Hayden and Claire Keegan have, in very different ways, written gripping stories about things that should alarm us: there are awful truths right at the heart of our societies and systems. However, in their wit, elegance and compassion, these powerful winning books also help us think about the choices we make, and how to make the future better. Orwell would be proud. Probably the most important and touching book I’ve read this year… It’s horrific and nobody comes out looking good, least of all us citizens of Europe, who have allowed terrible things to go on in our name.” — Five Books Generously sponsored by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils 2022 was judged by Sophia Parker (chair), Director of Emerging Futures and founder and former-CEO of Little Village, Annabel Deas, investigative journalist at BBC Radio 4 and winner of The Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain’s Social Evils 2021, Jo Swinson, Director of Partners for a New Economy and former Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Kirsty McNeill, Executive Director for Policy, Advocacy, and Campaigns at Save the Children, and Sophia Moreau, a multi-award winning campaigner and Head of Advocacy at Little Village. Sophia Parker said of Ed Thomas’s winning entry, The Cost of Covid – Burnley Crisis: Irish journalist Sally Hayden describes one of the great tragedies of our era, the story of the thousands of refugees bent on starting new lives in the West, who instead spend years rotting in Sudanese refugee camps, trapped in Libyan prisons, clinging to sinking dinghies in the Mediterranean. Her harrowing portrait captures the voices of the Eritreans, Somalis, Ethiopians, Gambians and Sierra Leoneans caught up in this pitiless modern slave trade, who constantly remind us that the desire to better yourself is the most fundamental of human impulses. This is a remarkable and important book.” —Michela Wrong, author of In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

Everyone should read this book. It's so easy to gloss over headlines of suffering elsewhere in the world, assuming the UN will fix things. What happens when the UN and the EU are the problem? Who solves that? (Or the USA or any major Western power?) This is the fourth year that The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, sponsored by the Orwell Estate’s literary agents, A. M. Heath, and Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, has been awarded. The prize rewards outstanding novels and collections of short stories first published in the UK that illuminate major social and political themes, present or past, through the art of narrative. The triumph of the debut book by Sally Hayden, a 33-year-old Irish reporter, is to inject a renewed urgency and moral clarity into a story most people think they are familiar with.” — The Times of LondonJoining Sanderson on the judging panel were writer and science journalist Laura Spinney; critic and writer for The Observer, Rachel Cooke; BBC journalist and presenter, Clive Myrie; author and New Yorker writer, Samanth Subramanian and critic and broadcaster, Georgina Godwin. An Post Irish Book Awards 2022: This year's winners revealed". The Irish Times. 23 November 2022 . Retrieved 24 November 2022.

Kafka retold by an Irishwoman in Africa. Read this great book shedding light on a monstrous crime.” —John Sweeney, host of Hunting Ghislaine with John Sweeney Through its screen she saw horrors that Europe was intent on ignoring, disappearing photos and videos from disappearing people. “What is it like,” she reflects, “to watch innocent people being shot through Facebook Messenger?” Jarring messages interject in Hayden’s text the way they must have flashed as notifications on her phone. “They are beating and shooting us. There’s no food, no water. The children are crying, starving. Please.” Chair of judges Caroline Sanderson said the books were “marvellously wide-ranging in terms of setting, era, and the creative approaches on display” and “however different the canvas, all have enthralling human stories at their heart”. Hayden’s reporting is journalism on a new level. I can only recommend that you, the reader, take the plunge and learn about the deepest abysses of humanity & the systems it has created.” — E-International Relations The book is a painstaking work of primary research but it is also a furious and passionate polemic.” — Jonathan CoeIf you are interested in learning about this topic, search for Sally Hayden online and read a few articles. Sally Hayden’s heart-stopping account of the plight of contemporary refugees is both a compelling epic and an intimate encounter with exact personal experience. She achieves what all great writing hopes to do—the restoration of humanity to those who have been deprived of it. This is a vital book for anyone who wants to feel what it means to be human in the 21st century.” —Fintan O’Toole, author of The Politics of Pain Hayden uses Essey’s case to discuss the political situation in Libya, the position of the EU in funding Libyan coastguards, so that refugees will not make it to EU waters, where they would have refugee status and the work done by the various UN bodies involved with refugees, partially funded by the EU. Super-Infinite by Rundell is a look at the myriad lives of the poet John Donne, and “brings the poet to life for the fan of his works, and it makes the person who has yet to discover them want to,” said the judges.

Hayden makes the list with her first book, My Fourth Time, We Drowned, which investigates the migrant crisis across north Africa and into Europe through the experience and testimony of refugees. The judges said it was “an exceptional, extraordinarily powerful work of reportage”. They praised “Hayden’s dogged determination to foreground the stories of those who brave the world’s deadliest migration route across the Mediterranean from Libya” and said it was “nothing short of heroic”. a b Doyle, Martin (7 December 2022). "Sally Hayden wins An Post Irish Book of the Year award for My Fourth Time, We Drowned". The Irish Times. The evidence [presented] in My Fourth Time, We Drownedis overwhelming. The facts argue for a more urgent and humane migrant policy. — Washington Independent Review of Books

David Collins and Hannah Al-Othman were also awarded a Special Prize for their entry, The Murder of Agnes Wanjiru. Sophia Parker said: She then starts her story properly with Essey in Eritrea (a country about which I knew nothing apart from its location). He makes his way across Ethiopia and Sudan, to Libya, where he unsuccessfully tries to travel by people smugglers’ dinghy to Europe. Having been stopped by Libyan coastal patrols twice and getting his extended family to pay bribes to get him freed, his family runs out of money and he is imprisoned in Libya.