Dorian Lynskey’s “biography” of George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four has made it on to the longlist for the Orwell prize for political writing.

Set up by the Orwell Foundation, the £3,000 prize is intended to reward those books that best meet Orwell’s ambition “to make political writing into an art”. Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth, which traces the origins of Nineteen Eighty-Four to the time Orwell spent fighting on the republican side in the Spanish civil war, is up against 11 other titles. These include Guardian journalist Amelia Gentleman’s exposé The Windrush Betrayal, Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women, about the gender data gap, and the poet Kate Clanchy’s memoir of life as a teacher, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me.

“None of us are thinking about life in quite the same way as we were even a few weeks ago. Politics looks and feels very different too,” admitted head of Bloomberg Economics and chair of judges Stephanie Flanders.

“But the books on this year’s longlist are not about ordinary politics. In fact, most aren’t about mainstream politics at all. They are, though, political in the most important sense: they cast fresh light on something that matters and perhaps inspire us to consider how things might be better.”

Also in the running for the prize are Julia Lovell’s Maoism: A Global History, Robert Macfarlane’s journey to the world beneath our feet, Underland, and Azadeh Moaveni’s investigation into the women of Islamic State, Guest House for Young Widows.

Flanders added that all 12 books were also “a good and satisfying read … We surely need those more than ever.”

The longlist for the £3,000 Orwell prize for political fiction was also announced on Wednesday, ranging from Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, a stream of consciousness from a middle-aged woman in Ohio, to Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker-winning Girl, Woman, Other and Attica Locke’s Heaven, My Home, in which a black Texas Ranger investigates the disappearance of a white supremacist’s son. Nine of the 13 longlisted titles are written by women.

Chair of judges for the fiction prize, Jude Kelly, said the lineup “pays homage to the ability of the writer’s voice to absorb political power structures and return them to us in stories of personal identity, community tensions, how the long tail of history impacts on the present, and the emerging strength of women to define what ‘political’ means.”

The shortlists will be announced in mid-May, with the winners to be revealed on 25 June, Orwell’s birthday.

Orwell prize for political writing 2020 longlist

Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War by Tim Bouverie (Bodley Head)

Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me by Kate Clanchy (Picador)

Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez (Chatto & Windus)

The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment by Amelia Gentleman (Guardian Faber)

Follow Me, Akhi: The Online World of British Muslims by Hussein Kesvani (Hurst)

Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell (Bodley Head)

The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 by Dorian Lynskey (Picador)

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton)

Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of Isis by Azadeh Moaveni (Scribe)

Margaret Thatcher – Herself Alone: The Authorised Biography Vol Three by Charles Moore (Allen Lane)

Kremlin Winter: Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin by Robert Service (Picador)

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Profile)

Orwell prize for political fiction 2020 longlist

This Paradise by Ruby Cowling (Boiler House Press)

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (Galley Beggar Press)

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton)

The Wall by John Lanchester (Faber & Faber)

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner (Granta)

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton)

Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke (Serpent’s Tail)

To Calais, in Ordinary Time by James Meek (Canongate)

Girl by Edna O’Brien (Faber & Faber)

The Travelers by Regina Porter (Jonathan Cape)

Broken Jaw by Minoli Salgado (The 87 Press)

Spring by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton)

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (Fleet)