Jenny Kleeman
The Guardian, The Financial Times, BBC Radio 4Jenny Kleeman is a journalist, broadcaster and author. She writes long form journalism for the Guardian, the Financial Times Magazine and the Sunday Times Magazine. A regular voice on BBC Radio 4, Jenny writes and presents the documentary series The Gift, and has reported for BBC One’s Panorama and Channel 4’s Dispatches, as well as making 13 films from across the globe for Channel 4’s Unreported World. Her first book, Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, was published in 2020 and has been translated into eleven languages. Her second book The Price of Life, was published in March 2024.
Her shortlisted pieces are:
- America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world: ‘There are going to be countries of old people starving to death’
- Inside Israel’s fight to make fathers of its dead soldiers
- ‘You tried to tell yourself I wasn’t real’: what happens when people with acute psychosis meet the voices in their heads?
- The Gift: Switched, Part 1
The hallmark of all of Jenny Kleeman’s reports is her empathetic analysis of people with extraordinary ambitions or in life-changing circumstances. Her writing brings out the humanity of her subjects with emotional intelligence and great sensitivity. Her writing on American pronatalists, or Israelis who want dead soldiers to live on through harvesting their semen, never stooped to cliche or caricature, even when it shocked. Orwell wanted good prose to have purpose and reject humbug, and Kleeman’s writing fits that mould.
– Matt Walsh, Chair of Judges, The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2025
