Orwell

George Orwell’s years as a colonial policeman in Burma in the 1920s preoccupied him for the rest of his life. Straight out of Eton, he was thrown into a world that mirrored the public school with its rivalries and floggings; except that now it was the Burmese people who were being flogged. He wrote about it repeatedly: in his 1934 novel Burmese Days, several essays, and passages devoted to Burma in The Road to Wigan Pier. Even on his deathbed he was writing notes for a novella about Burma entitled A Smoking Room Story.…

After spending a summer reading George Orwell in between looking after her teenage children, the Australian author and former human rights lawyer Anna Funder observed how few references the Nineteen Eighty-Four author made to the women in his life. She was especially dismayed by the absence of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Orwell’s first wife, who joined her husband on research trips and who died while undergoing surgery aged 39. And so in the genre-bending Wifedom – which has been shortlisted for the Gordon Burn prize ­– Funder…

A “magnificent” and “forensic” account of the policy decisions leading up to the Grenfell tower fire, Show Me the Bodies: How We Let Grenfell Happen by Peter Apps, has won the 2023 Orwell prize for political writing. Meanwhile, Tom Crewe won the prize for political fiction with his historical novel The New Life, which dramatises the struggle to change Britain’s laws related to homosexuality in the 1890s.The prizes aim to reward works that meet Orwell’s ambition “to make political writing into an art”. The winning books,…

My earliest reading memoryI was living in Leningrad and there was a book called The Wonderful Adventure of Nils Holgersson, by a Swedish author, Selma Lagerlöf. It inspired me to write my first book when I was five, called Lenin and His Magical Goose, in which Lenin meets a magical Armenian goose and they invade Finland together and make it socialist.My favourite book growing upI really liked Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn. By this point I had arrived in America and had difficulty figuring out what the county was all…

Though he worked for the BBC for two and a half years and often spoke on air, no recording of George Orwell’s voice has been found. Many friends and memoirists have described it, and his struggles to make himself audible (all the more so after a sniper’s bullet went through his throat in Spain), but their accounts vary: was his voice high-pitched or husky, old Etonian or a Cockney drawl? DJ Taylor settles for calling it deadpan, but its elusiveness seems apt.Orwell was one of the great voices of the 20th century. But the…

Despite his death in 1950, George Orwell has become the latest author to join Substack, following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie and George Saunders.The Orwell Foundation is set to launch Orwell Daily, which will serialise Orwell’s work via the email subscription platform.Orwell Daily will begin on 28 October with the writer’s memoir Down and Out in Paris and London. Published in 1933, this was Orwell’s first published full-length work. It begins in Paris, where Orwell worked as a dishwasher at Hotel X, and then moves…

My earliest reading memorySomething called the Beacon Readers at a small village school, in the corner of a field. I can picture the jacket’s conical torch design on a brown cloth background.My favourite book growing upI liked books about witches, of which there seemed to be quite a lot lying around. A little later, aged about 11, I discovered Alistair MacLean whose formula – a group of desperadoes on a wartime mission but with a traitor in their number – I found almost intolerably exciting.The book that changed me as a…

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan and My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route by Sally Hayden have won the Orwell prizes for political fiction and writing.Keegan’s “beautifully written evocation of Ireland in the 1980s” has won the fiction prize, while Hayden’s “urgent and compassionate” book took the political writing prize. Both authors will be awarded £3,000.Jean Seaton, director of the Orwell Foundation, said the winners have, “in very different ways, written gripping…