Ben Judah has been nominated for the 2019 Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage — a Polish prize named after a writer whose example, Judah has said, he has long tried to follow — for his book This Is London (published in Britain in 2016). It’s a fizzing, buzzing, choral account of the forgotten people of the capital. It reminded me of the work of Orwell and of Studs Terkel, who gathered oral history in Chicago from sharecroppers and signalmen as well as models and judges because he believed that “ordinary people have extraordinary thoughts”.