Anna Lamche with Gary Younge

ONE of the Islington Tribune’s former reporters has won the prestigious Orwell Society award for review-writing.

Anna Lamche, who lives in north London, was handed the prize by George Orwell’s son, Richard, at the society’s AGM on Saturday.

She is now a reporter at the BBC where, as it happens, Mr Orwell also worked for a spell during his career.

The journalist Gary Younge was another special guest at the prize-giving event held at the Upstairs At The Gatehouse theatre in Highgate Village.

Ms Lamche won The Orwell Society/NUJ Young Journalists’ Award for a review of the book Perfection by Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico.

She said: “I thought, I haven’t done this for so long and I really miss writing reviews.

“So much of my work now is writing news copy so it was a really good opportunity to have a deadline to do something different.”

The Orwell Society meets at Upstairs At The Gatehouse in Highgate

Ms Lamche saw the competition advertised in the NUJ magazine and decided to enter. The novel tells the story of Anna and Tom, two Italian “digital nomads” living in Berlin in the 2010s.

She said: “It really questions the myth of travelling as a mode of self-discovery and finding meaning. If you’re just going to go to a city and do the same thing you’d do in another city, fail to learn the language, fail to understand what the communities are dealing with and fail to engage – is that actually a process of finding meaning or finding yourself?”

She added: “Review writing is a chance to step away from the immediacy of events and the daily news cycle and take one thing and really give it your attention.

“The Tribune was where I learnt to write reviews and there is genuinely no local paper like it where you find such a range of real serious underground reporting as well as arts pages with really varied interviews.”

Ms Lamche’s next endeavour sees her working with the British Library and Castlehaven Community Centre to run a series of four free poetry workshops starting late summer.