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A Hanging

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It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.

One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.

Eight o’clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. “For God’s sake hurry up, Francis,” he said irritably. “The man ought to have been dead by this time. Aren’t you ready yet?”

Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles, waved his black hand. “Yes sir, yes sir,” he bubbled. “All iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman iss waiting. We shall proceed.”

“Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can’t get their breakfast till this job’s over.”

We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened–a dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.

“Who let that bloody brute in here?” said the superintendent angrily. “Catch it, someone!”

A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail wails. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still straining and whimpering.

It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working –bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming–all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.

The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the prison, and overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed, with planking on top, and above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed him to the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman limbed up and fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck.

We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough circle round the gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”, not urgent and fearful like a prayer or a cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner’s face. But the sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over again: “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!”

The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes seemed to pass. The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on, “Ram! Ram! Ram!” never faltering for an instant. The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed number – fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The Indians had gone grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries – each cry another second of life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that abominable noise!

Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift motion with his stick. “Chalo!” he shouted almost fiercely.

There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a corner of the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went round the gallows to inspect the prisoner’s body. He was dangling with his toes pointed straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.

The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it oscillated, slightly. “He’s all right,” said the superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows, and blew out a deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He glanced at his wrist-watch. “Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning, thank God.”

The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and conscious of having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of the gallows yard, past the condemned cells with their waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The convicts, under the command of warders armed with lathis, were already receiving their breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began chattering gaily.

The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a knowing smile: “Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man), when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. –Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwallah, two rupees eight annas. Classy European style.”

Several people laughed – at what, nobody seemed certain.

Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. “Well, sir, all hass passed off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished – flick! like that. It iss not always so – oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull the prisoner’s legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!”

“Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,” said the superintendent.

“Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall, clung to the bars of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. “My dear fellow,” we said, “think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us!” But no, he would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome!”

I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. “You’d better all come out and have a drink,” he said quite genially. “I’ve got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it.”

We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. “Pulling at his legs!” exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began laughing again. At that moment Francis’s anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred yards away.

First published in The Adelphi, August 1931 | Reprinted in The New Savoy, 1946

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Orwell Estate.

The Faceless Drug – Francesca Morgan

“I’m not sure about this,” she muttered as the needle was placed in front of her.

The nurse smiled sympathetically, “Trust me, it doesn’t hurt a bit.”

“No,” she looked up at the nurse, “I mean I’m not sure about this morally.”

With a response so well-rehearsed there was barely a pause, the nurse said “Moral Code 52, issued by The Government of the United People of Earth, states that: ‘the use and distribution of the Juror Drug is found to be not only legally applicable but also advisable in all 7 states of the world.’”

“Right… great.” She said with a sigh, turning her gaze to the rain dribbling down the window. “Can I have a few minutes? I just want to think.”

“Of course, whatever you want.” The nurse gave her an exasperated look and waddled out of the examination room with a series of squeaks resonating from her uniform-blue crocs.

Once the nurse left her alone, she could deliberate.

She knew what the government said about it: a drug that blurs the face of the accused. How brilliant! Finally, each member of the jury could decide on the verdict with no leniency, no bias. Instead of swaying for or against the defendant based on their appearance or their emotional presentation, jurors can deduce the sentencing founded on cold, hard facts.

She also knew what the newspapers said about it: a drug that not only blurs but is also said to reshape the face of the criminal defendant. The jurors told tales of feeling instinctively disgusted by the litigant, of seeing no longer a human, but an animal. It was suggested that the drug led to unjustly harsh judgments. Petty crime had ended in life sentences; embezzlement had resulted in the death penalty.

“Ok! Are we ready then?” said the nurse as she popped her head around the door with that same, unshakeable smile.

“I mean… I still don’t know.”

“Well, you’ve got to make up your mind. It’s not yet compulsory for jurors, but it’s highly recommended.” “

Yeah.” She thought for a moment. “Well, if The Government is advising the drug, I guess I’ll take it…”

“Wonderful sweetie! It should take a few minutes before it kicks in.”

“Ow!” The next thing she knew, the nurse had jabbed her arm with the needle. The horrible icy sensation of an injection spread through her left bicep. Then she was hastily guided out of the examination room and directed along a corridor before entering the place she had been dreading for weeks: the courtroom.

The other jury members were already seated, all with similarly dazed expressions. The defendant was only a few feet away and consulted his lawyers in nervous whispers. The first thing she noticed was how young he was. 19 years old? His eyes were bright with adolescence and his hands were strong but marred with callouses that stretched along the juts of his knuckles. She saw his eyes glaze over with tears before he rubbed them away hurriedly and his hands picked at his trousers in a fiercely agitated manner.

She wanted the drug to kick in. She didn’t want to see him. She wanted to see a monster.

And then, as if by magic, his body altered.

It wasn’t an overt change. His features sort of blurred and the edges appeared worn away. His skin seemed to droop like a painting left out in the rain. His mouth -once a pink oval- formerly opening and pursing in tense murmurs had gone, and in its place was a vacuous streak contorting into inaudible mumbles. Her eyes gently traced his face: moving around the pixelated rim; across the brow; down into the furrows; up to the sickly glow of the eyes. She followed the foundations of what had been a face, ten minutes ago.

He was still scared… at least she thought he was. The flustered motions of a desperate man were still recognisable in theory, but they no longer had the same triggering effect on her conscience. In fact, if she forgot what he used to look like then he could only be described as a monster.

No, he wasn’t a monster. When she harked back, she could still see the pain on his face and the dampness in his eyes. Oh, it was horrible! She remembered and it was horrible! She remembered and he was too human!

She remembered; so she let herself forget.

She let herself forget; so she reinvented.

She could see the actions for what they now were. They were the marks of a Machiavellian psychopath. Yes! She laughed out loud. How could she have overlooked this before? The whispering and the subtle tears, they were the sly forgery of sentiments. People like him couldn’t feel real emotions.

She didn’t care what he might have done. She cared even less at what he might not have done. She just wanted to make him pay.

She gripped the oak panels that lined the jury box until the tips of her fingers turned white. She couldn’t hear anything above the ringing in her head. The words of the lawyers were wasted, for the jury box was nothing more than an animal pen, and very soon every juror’s lust for blood would be satisfied.

It took them all of 5 minutes to decide the man’s fate. He was guilty of course; that’s what they said. They never saw his face after they convicted him, never saw his face again. But she wouldn’t forget him, the dampness of his eyes and how his hands picked at his trousers. How she had taken the drug knowing what it would do. How she had chosen to see him as an animal. How she was forced to see him as an animal, because if she had seen him as a human how could she have justified his sentence?

How could you ever justify sentencing another human to death?

 

Francesca Morgan was an Orwell Youth Prize Junior Winner in 2019, responding to the theme ‘A Fair Society?’. We asked her where she got her inspiration for ‘The Faceless Drug’ and what motivates her to write: 

 

What was the inspiration behind your piece?

Since reading an Orwell essay (‘A Hanging’) I was struck by the inhumanity of the death penalty. The incongruence between a man’s death and the amicable drink after the event was masterfully conveyed by Orwell. This inspired me to consider methods in the future which might purposefully remove emotions from judicial sentencing.

 

Why did you pick the form you did?

I did pander with the idea of an essay. However ultimately, I believe that only a story narrative could properly convey the mess of emotions experienced when dealing with a topic as sombre as the death penalty.

 

‘Why I write.’

The reason I write is a fairly selfish one if I’m being honest. I write in order to identify my own opinions on a subject. I find that only by the end of a story or essay have I established my views.

 

Advice to fellow young writers.

Write about something you feel innately passionate for. Don’t be scared of putting your views out there for others to disagree with. So long as you are writing about a topic that inspires you, you can’t go wrong.

 

A piece of writing that has influenced me.

Recently I read ‘Stoner’ by John Williams. It’s a story following one man’s ordinary life but Williams manages to mould a fairly bleak existence into a tale demonstrating the epic of the everyday.

George Orwell on Fairness

A FAIR SOCIETY? OYP THEME 2019

George Orwell is one of the world’s most influential writers, the visionary author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four and his eyewitness, non-fiction classics Down and Out in Paris in LondonThe Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia. During his life, and through his writing, Orwell was a fierce critic of totalitarianism and advocate for social justice.

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”

George Orwell, Why I Write (1946)

By the time of his death in 1950, he was world-renowned as a journalist and author: for his eyewitness reporting on war (shot in the neck in Spain) and poverty (tramping in London, washing dishes in Parisvisiting pits and the poor in Wigan); for his political and cultural commentary, where he stood up to power and said the unsayable (‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’); and for his fiction, including two of the greatest novels ever written: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. His clear writing and political purpose have inspired and influenced countless journalists, authors and others, of all political persuasions and none, in the generations since.

On this page, we’ll introduce some of the ideas which Orwell wrote about which could offer some inspiration for your own take on this year’s theme. You can also find links to Orwell’s own writing on The Orwell Foundation website (with thanks to the Orwell Estate and Penguin Books).

Race, Nation and Empire

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

George Orwell was born Eric Blair in India in 1903, which was then part of the British Empire. He was born to a comfortable ‘lower-upper-middle class’ family and a father who served the British Empire. Orwell’s own first job was as a policeman in Burma (today’s Myanmar). Orwell resigned from service while on leave in England in 1928.

In his first novel Burmese Days and striking essays like ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’, Orwell reflected on his own experiences of colonialism. He argued that the British Empire was a destructive force both for the people it governed and the colonialists themselves. Orwell also wrote that after his work for the British Empire he ‘began to look more closely at his own country and saw that England also had its oppressed.’

Orwell remained a trenchant critic of the British Empire throughout his life. He also warned against the rise of nationalism and sought to examine the causes and effects of ‘nationalist’ thinking on people’s understanding of society.

Economic Injustice

‘The average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.”

After returning to England Orwell set out to become a writer. Although he was from a comfortable background, in order to report on poverty and economic deprivation he wanted to experience it for himself as far as possible. He therefore made various expeditions ‘down and out’ in London, living as a ‘tramp’, which he described in his essay ‘The Spike’. Later, Orwell took jobs as a dishwasher in restaurants and cafes in the centre of Paris. Orwell’s non-fiction work Down and Out in Paris and London described these experiences and asked searching questions about attitudes to people without work or in low paid, insecure labour.

In 1936 Orwell travelled to England’s industrial heartlands in the north, where many people were experiencing great hardship following the Great Depression. In The Road to Wigan Pier, part social reportage, part political polemic, Orwell described what he had seen and learnt. As ever, Orwell wanted to experience people’s living and working conditions for himself and wrote vividly about the life of coal miners and their families.

In the second part of the book, Orwell made a controversial and highly-influential argument about why campaigners at the time were struggling to win support for their vision of a fair society. He argued that many campaigners for social justice misunderstood the emotional lives of the people they wanted to help, concentrating too much on promoting their own political doctrines and dogma. Instead, he argued in favour of ‘common decency’ and a sense of fairness. Orwell expanded on these themes in his wartime essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn‘, which argued for a ‘new form of Britishness’.

  • WATCH Orwell’s Down and Out: Live, The Orwell Foundation’s dramatized live-reading of Down and Out in Paris and London, which features the testimony of people who have experienced homelessness and rough-sleeping in the UK today
  • READ The Road to Wigan Pier diaries, a blog of Orwell’s personal diaries from 1936

Freedom and Totalitarianism

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

As an author, George Orwell is probably best known for his powerful, stark depictions of totalitarianism in his parable Animal Farm and dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In Animal Farm, inspired by the history of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalin’s dictatorship, Orwell depicted how a movement which was begun with ideas of fairness could be distorted into something very different. Nineteen Eighty-Four, his final novel, imagines a society in which the pressures of war and the power of the state have made even the idea of values like fairness impossible.

  • WATCH 1984: Live, The Orwell Foundation’s dramatized, unabridged live-reading of 1984, read by actors, writers, journalists and members of the public at Senate House in 2017
  • READ ‘The Freedom of the Press‘, Orwell’s proposed introduction to Animal Farm

Resources

We hope teachers will find the Orwell Youth Prize a valuable way of introducing students to writing independently, as well as Orwell’s own work. But there are many other ways of using Orwell in the classroom.

Whatever your subject  – politics, English, history, citizenship, drama to name but a few – whatever the age group – the Orwell Foundation website also has a wealth of resources about Orwell and his work. Over the year’s, we’ve also produced a range of resources to accompany our Youth Prize themes. These are available free to everyone.

Our resources include works by George Orwell, works about George Orwell and video of events run by the Orwell Prize on politics and literature. Below we provide a useful guide to material that might be of particular interest in the classroom; much more is available through the publishers of Orwell, Penguin and Harvill Secker, and the works below are reproduced under copyright of them and the Orwell Estate and with their kind permission.

Works by Orwell

We have dedicated webpages for each of Orwell’s six novels – Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air and of course Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – and three major non-fiction works – Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia. Additionally, a selection of other essays and short works (including poetry) by Orwell is available.

Orwell Daily is our weekly Substack serial, picking out highlights and hidden gems from Orwell’s journalism, letters and diaries and sharing them with subscribers “on the day” that they were first published. Please not that the serial is pitched at adult readers.

Orwell and Journalism

In July 2022, the Orwell Youth Prize teamed up with University College London Special Collections and the Orwell Archive to run a summer school for Year 12s on ‘Orwell and Journalism: In Pursuit of Truth’. As part of this project, we also produced online resources, designed for students in Years 12 and 13, on Orwell’s work as a journalist and how his life experiences informed his work.

The written resource includes materials from the Orwell Archive, while the short film includes background about Orwell’s life, journalism and writing style, as well as insights from contemporary journalists.

Events and films

Many of our Orwell Foundation events based on Orwell’s life and work and might be useful: we keep a library of free-to-view recordings on our YouTube.

The Orwell Youth Prize also filmed our own exclusive interview with Richard Blair, which you can see here. Additionally, there are events based on themes Orwell wrote about and many events discussing different aspects of politics and society. In 2020, we also created a new resource on “Orwell and Empire” to accompany Dr Tristram Hunt’s Orwell Memorial Lecture.

Orwell in the Classroom

Below are a few examples of works, or combinations of works, which could work particularly well in the classroom or workshops. They have been selected based on the depth of what we have available, but also the sorts of exercises that they could be used for (e.g. comparing source material with the finished product) and curriculum relevance.

Individual essays that could prompt discussion – a few suggestions

Orwell wrote a number of compelling, accessible essays about language and literature: what do we think of Orwell’s rules? What should the role of literature be?

Eyewitness/descriptive essays: how does Orwell use imagery and other techniques?

Orwell’s essays about politics and ideas (these could be particularly useful in 20th century history – WWII; The Cold War; decolonization etc):

He was also a master at writing about the particular to make a more general point:

Other:

Reviews of authors on the curriculum

Orwell’s best-known pieces of criticism include his essays  on Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling; lesser-known reviews include an essay on W. B. Yeats.

Works about particular novels

We have a wealth of background material on all of Orwell’s works, many of which are curriculum stalwarts.

  • for Nineteen Eighty-Four we have Orwell’s essays about language, politics and culture, works by others adapting it, reviews and analysis which could all give a fresh perspective
  • for Animal Farm we have essays concerned with similar themes, Orwell’s proposed prefaces, reviews, analysis and the stories behind the rejections and adaptations

Related works by others

We have pieces about other works contemporary to Orwell. For example, how does Orwell’s reportage in Down and Out (e.g.) compare to other similar works? How was it received by similar authors? And how do Orwell’s dystopias/representations of politics compare to others? (Not least those, like Zamyatin and Koestler, whose works he reviewed.)

We have some material on adaptations. How have others adapted Orwell and his work? For example, Mike Radford and the BBC on Nineteen Eighty Four, Chris Durlacher on adapting Orwell’s life, the story about the cartoon film of Animal Farm. How would you adapt Orwell?

And we have pieces by those inspired by Orwell. How have others followed in Orwell’s footsteps? For example, Emma Larkin in Burma, Stephen Armstrong and others to Wigan. How would you approach a similar project?

The Diaries

For historical source analysis – especially World War II – we have Orwell’s 1938-42 diaries. These also include other interesting contemporary sources, or links to them, such as a public information leaflet on masking windows in July 1939. Most striking are the newspaper articles Orwell references (and which the Diaries blog includes) in the approach to war, summer 1939, e.g. the surprise as the Nazi Soviet Pact is signed in August 1939.

These could help pupils improve their reading of historical sources, contribute to their historical understanding and be used to stimulate wider discussion. Orwell’s diaries can also be read as preparatory work for his longer essays and work, which could be an engaging way of comparing rough drafts with finished products.

For instance, The Road to Wigan Pier diary and Orwell’s other notes (e.g. Barnsley) were obviously kept with The Road to Wigan Pier in mind. Orwell’s Morocco diary (September 1938 to March 1939, part of the 1938-42 diaries) provides the basis for the essay ‘Marrakech’, while the Hop-Picking diaries are used for Down and Out in Paris and London, A Clergyman’s Daughter and essays including ‘Hop-picking’, ‘A Day in the Life of a Tramp’ and ‘The Spike’ (and the links from the Hop-Picking blog include newsreel and other materials).

A simple question would be: how does Orwell turn this material into essays and books? More complex questions might touch on the motivations, ethics and effects of this editing is. This extract from chapter one of Wigan Pier could be a starting point, as is this Observer article, which considers Orwell’s fact and fiction, and articles by Orwell winners, Timothy Garton Ash and Neal Ascherson on journalist Ryszard Kapuściński.

English Language Practice Papers

We have prepared these GCSE AQA-style exam practice papers to give you a helping hand – and to promote the Orwell Youth Prize (registered charity 1156494).

Biography

George Orwell was an English novelist, essayist, and critic most famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

The following biography was written by D.J. Taylor. Taylor is an author, journalist and critic. His biography, Orwell: The Life won the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award. His new biography, Orwell: The New Life was published in 2023. D.J. Taylor is a member of the Orwell Council.

The Orwell Foundation is a registered charity. If you value these resources, please consider becoming a Friend or Patron or making a donation to support our work. You can find more work about Orwell in our library.

Orwell: A (Brief) Life, by D.J. Taylor

GEORGE ORWELL, the pen-name of Eric Arthur Blair, was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, where his father, Richard Walmesley Blair, was working as an Opium Agent in the Indian Civil Service, into what – with the uncanny precision he brought to all social judgments – he described as ‘the lower-upper-middle classes’. In fact the Blairs were remote descendants of the Fane Earls of Westmoreland. Like many a child of the Raj, Orwell was swiftly returned to England and brought up almost exclusively by his mother. The Thames Valley locales in which the family settled provided the background to his novel Coming Up For Air (1939).

Happily for the family finances – never flourishing – Orwell was a studious child. From St Cyprian’s preparatory school in Eastbourne, a legendary establishment that also educated Cyril Connolly and Cecil Beaton, he won a King’s Scholarship to Eton College, arriving at the school in May 1917. Orwell left a caustic memoir of his time at St Cyprian’s (‘Such, Such Were The Joys’) but also remarked that ‘No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.’ At Eton he frankly slacked, leaving the school in December 1921 after only a term in the sixth form. The following June he passed the entrance examination of the Indian Imperial Police and was accepted into its Burma division.

Orwell’s five-year stint in Burma is often seen as a mournful period of parentally-ordained exile. However both sides of his family were professionally attached to the Eastern Empire, and his stated reason for applying for the Burma posting was that he had relatives there. Almost nothing is known of Orwell’s time in the province, other than that it offered the material for two of his best-known essays, ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and his first novel Burmese Days (1934). It also ruined his health. Although disillusioned by the Imperial ‘racket’ he had helped to administer, he left Burma in June 1927 on a medical certificate. The decision to resign from the Burma Police was taken after his return.

For the next five years he led a vagrant life. Some of this time was spent at his parents’ home in Southwold, Suffolk. There were periods teaching in private schools, living in Paris and masquerading as a tramp, the background to his first published work, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). His professional alias, which combined the name of the reigning monarch with a local river, was adopted shortly before publication. His teaching career was brought to a close by a bout of pneumonia and at the end of 1934, having used a long, recuperative stay in Southwold to complete a second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), he decamped to London to work in a Hampstead bookshop. This was a productive period. Here he met and married his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, and wrote a third novel, partly based on his book-trade experiences,Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).

The Orwells began their married life in a tiny cottage in Wallington, Hertfordshire, where Orwell worked up the material gathered on a recent tour of the industrial north into The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Although the book’s second half consists of a long, inflammatory polemic on Socialism, Orwell’s political views were still not fully formed. The defining political experience of his life, alternatively, was the six months he spent in Spain, in 1937, as a Republican volunteer against Franco. He was wounded in the throat – the bullet passing within a few millimetres of his carotid artery – and was present in Barcelona when Soviet-sponsored hit-squads attempted to suppress the Trotskyist POUM militia, of which he had been a member. Spain made Orwell ‘believe in Socialism for the first time’, as he put it, while instilling an enduring hatred of totalitarian political systems.

Homage to Catalonia, an account of his time in Spain, was published in April 1938. He spent most of the next year recuperating, both in England and Morocco, from a life-threatening lung haemorrhage. At this stage Orwell was determined to oppose the looming international conflict, only changing his mind on the announcement of the Russo-German pact in August 1939. Initially Orwell had high hopes of the war, which he believed would instil a sense of Socialist purpose: this view was developed in the pamphlet essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941). Rejected for military service on health grounds, he became a talks producer in the BBC’s Eastern Service, a job he came to dislike. The BBC’s atmosphere, he complained, ‘is something between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless’. In 1943 he secured a more congenial billet as literary editor of the left-wing weekly magazine Tribune, to which he also contributed a column under the heading ‘As I Please’.

Animal Farm, his bitter satire of the Soviet experiment, was written by the middle of 1944. Publishers’ timidity, and the covert pressure exerted by a Russian spy working for the Ministry of Information, delayed its appearance until August 1945. By this time Orwell’s personal life was in ruins. Five months previously Eileen had died of heart failure during a routine operation. The couple had previously adopted a small boy, Richard Horatio Blair, whom Orwell, with the help of his sister Avril, determined to raise on his own.

Through his friend David Astor, he had already begun to explore the possibility of living on the remote Scottish island of Jura. Much of the last half-decade of his life was spent in the Inner Hebrides struggling against worsening health to complete his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. After finishing a final draft at the end of 1948 he suffered a complete physical collapse and was taken away to a nursing home in the Cotswolds suffering from advanced tuberculosis. The novel’s enormous international success, on publication in June 1949, came too late for its author. He was transferred to University College Hospital in September and died there on 21 January 1950, aged 46. Shortly before his death he made an unexpected second marriage to Sonia Brownell, an editorial assistant on the literary magazine Horizon. Sitting down to read his obituaries on the day of his funeral, his friend Malcolm Muggeridge thought that he saw in them ‘how the legend of a human being is created’.


D. J. Taylor was born in Norwich in 1960. He is the author of five novels, including English Settlement, which won a Grinzane Cavour prize, Trespass and The Comedy Man. He is also well-known as a critic and reviewer, and is the author of A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s, and an acclaimed biography, Thackeray. His critically acclaimed Orwell biography, Orwell: The Life (2003) won the Whitbread Biography Award, and he gave the 2005 Orwell Lecture entitled ‘Projections of the Inner “I”: George Orwell’s Fiction’. He is married with three children and lives in Norwich. Orwell: The New Life was published in 2023.

For teachers

Whatever your subject  – politics, English, history, citizenship, drama to name but a few – whatever the age group you teach – the Orwell Foundation website has a wealth of resources. These are available free to everyone, regardless of whether you or your school are currently involved with the Youth Prize. If you are interested in learning more about our workshops in schools, please get in contact with the administrator at admin@orwellyouthprize.co.uk.

Our resources include works by George Orwell, works about George Orwell and video of events run by the Orwell Prize on politics and literature. Below we provide a useful guide to material that might be of particular interest in the classroom; much more is available through the publishers of Orwell, Penguin and Harvill Secker, and the works below are reproduced under copyright of them and the Orwell Estate and with their kind permission.

Works by Orwell

There is a dedicated webpage for each of Orwell’s six novels – Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air and of course Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – and three major non-fiction works – Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia.

Additionally, a selection of other essays and short works (including poetry) by Orwell is available.

There are also three blogs of diaries written by Orwell:

  • 1938-42, includes eyewitness accounts of the Blitz and the run up to WWII (as well as Orwell’s time in Morocco and his experiences of keeping animals and growing vegetables…)
  • Hop-picking (1931), follows some of Orwell’s tramping exploits and his experience of picking hops in Kent, which many urban workers and their families would do in the summer
  • The Road to Wigan Pier (1936), includes Orwell’s research for the book of the same name

Works about Orwell

We have links to analysis, reviews and other material based on Orwell’s life and work; the most relevant to individual novels and diaries should already be linked to from the relevant novel and diary pages.

Orwell Prize events

Many of our Orwell Prize events based on Orwell’s life and work and might be useful. These include:

The Orwell Youth Prize also filmed our own exclusive interview with Richard Blair, which you can see here. Additionally, there are events based on themes Orwell wrote about (such as 2012’s ‘Poverty then and now, Orwell and his successors’), events about political writing more generally (such as ‘Autopsy of a Story’ with three shortlisted journalists dissecting their work and debates like ‘What makes a good political novel?’ with a critic and political novelists), and many events discussing different aspects of politics and society.

Below are a few examples of works, or combinations of works, which could work particularly well in the classroom or workshops. They have been selected based on the depth of what we have available, but also the sorts of exercises that they could be used for (e.g. comparing source material with the finished product) and curriculum relevance.

The Diaries

For historical source analysis – especially World War II – we have Orwell’s 1938-42 diaries. These also include other interesting contemporary sources, or links to them, such as a public information leaflet on masking windows in July 1939. Most striking are the newspaper articles Orwell references (and which the Diaries blog includes) in the approach to war, summer 1939, e.g. the surprise as the Nazi Soviet Pact is signed in August 1939.

Thesecould help pupils improve their reading of historical sources, contribute to their historical understanding and be used to stimulate wider discussion. Orwell’s diaries can also be read as preparatory work for his longer essays and work, which could be an engaging way of comparing rough drafts with finished products.

For instance, The Road to Wigan Pier diary and Orwell’s other notes (e.g. Barnsley) were obviously kept with The Road to Wigan Pier in mind. Orwell’s Morocco diary (September 1938 to March 1939, part of the 1938-42 diaries) provides the basis for the essay ‘Marrakech’, while the Hop-Picking diaries are used for Down and Out in Paris and London, A Clergyman’s Daughter and essays including ‘Hop-picking’, ‘A Day in the Life of a Tramp’ and ‘The Spike’ (and the links from the Hop-Picking blog include newsreel and other materials).

A simple question would be: how does Orwell turn this material into essays and books? More complex questions might touch on the motivations, ethics and effects of this editing is. This extract from chapter one of Wigan Pier could be a starting point, as is this Observer article, which considers Orwell’s fact and fiction, and articles by Orwell winners, Timothy Garton Ash and Neal Ascherson on journalist Ryszard Kapuściński.

Individual essays that could prompt discussion – a few suggestions

Orwell wrote a number of compelling, accessible essays about language and literature: what do we think of Orwell’s rules? What should the role of literature be?

Eyewitness/descriptive essays: how does Orwell use imagery and other techniques?

Orwell’s essays about politics and ideas (these could be particularly useful in 20th century history – WWII; The Cold War; decolonization etc):

He was also a master at writing about the particular to make a more general point:

Other:

Reviews of authors on the curriculum

Orwell’s best-known pieces of criticism include his essays  on Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling; lesser-known reviews include an essay on W. B. Yeats.

Works about particular novels

We have a wealth of background material on all of Orwell’s works, many of which are curriculum stalwarts.

  • for Nineteen Eighty-Four we have Orwell’s essays about language, politics and culture, works by others adapting it, reviews and analysis which could all give a fresh perspective
  • for Animal Farm we have essays concerned with similar themes, Orwell’s proposed prefaces, reviews, analysis and the stories behind the rejections and adaptations

Related works by others

We have pieces about other works contemporary to Orwell. For example, how does Orwell’s reportage in Down and Out (e.g.) compare to other similar works? How was it received by similar authors? And how do Orwell’s dystopias/representations of politics compare to others? (Not least those, like Zamyatin and Koestler, whose works he reviewed.)

We have some material on adaptations. How have others adapted Orwell and his work? For example, Mike Radford and the BBC on Nineteen Eighty Four, Chris Durlacher on adapting Orwell’s life, the story about the cartoon film of Animal Farm. How would you adapt Orwell?

And we have pieces by those inspired by Orwell. How have others followed in Orwell’s footsteps? For example, Emma Larkin in Burma, Stephen Armstrong and others to Wigan. How would you approach a similar project?

English Language Practice Papers

We have prepared these GCSE AQA-style exam practice papers to give you a helping hand – and to promote the Orwell Youth Prize (registered charity 1156494).

Scripts – which would allow performance

Many radio scripts by Orwell exist, such as adaptations of Animal Farm and various fairy tales. These can be found in the Orwell Archive and in editions of the Complete Works.

However, online we have a Christmas edition of his radio poetry programme, Voice as well as his own poetry. We also have a short one scene piece by a young Orwell called ‘Free Will’. There is also one chapter of A Clergyman’s Daughter, set in Trafalgar Square, which is written entirely in dramatic form.

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A Very British Killing: Looking for the Devil in the Detail

The Orwell Prize, Britain’s most prestigious prize for political writing, is supported by the Media Standards Trust, Political Quarterly, AM Heath and Richard Blair (Orwell’s son). A guest post by A.T.Williams, winner of The Orwell Prize for Books 2013 Baha Mousa was just a name at first. It appeared on a list of victims, people killed in Basra by British troops in 2003. There was little to distinguish him from the others. Except that he was the only one on the list who had been killed whilst held for interrogation in a British base. That was enough to spark my interest. Here was a man, working in a hotel as a receptionist, arrested by British soldiers looking for insurgents, taken into custody for questioning and thirty-six hours later ending up dead. There were all sorts of reasons why that may have happened. But legally, it was ‘interesting’ because being held in the middle of an Army camp he was within British jurisdiction when he died. With that came the argument that British law applied, law which included obligations under the Human Rights Act to investigate properly a death involving a state authority – in this case, the Army. But then I saw the post-mortem report and photographs of Baha Mousa. I can still feel the intense shock they provoked. They were visceral confirmation that this wasn’t just an ‘interesting’ legal case. A face distorted, almost unrecognisable, bloodied and swollen. A torso livid with huge swathes of bruising. Wrists with rings of cut flesh. A strangulation line across the throat. These were pictures of someone mauled over a protracted period of time. Seeing those photographs made me intensely angry. I could understand how troops might lose control in a battle zone. That would hardly be unusual. But these injuries were inflicted on a civilian in the heart of a British military base, and, as I discovered later, only a few yards from accommodation quarters for officers and men. How could that have happened? It was a question which drove years of panning through a mountain of information. As Mousa’s killing achieved notoriety (through the determination of Daoud Mousa, Baha’s father, not to let his son’s death go unnoticed, and Phil Shiner, the lawyer who brought the remarkable claim for judicial review in the High Court), so the legal hearings came thick and fast, each producing more detail, each uncovering layers of inaction and indifference. First, there was a farcical court martial. Seven soldiers were prosecuted for the death, the ill-treatment of nine other prisoners held with Mousa, or neglect of duty. But those soldiers who came to give evidence suddenly found themselves unable to remember what had happened; the Judge Advocate lamented the collective amnesia that had set in and had little choice but to dismiss most of the charges. Six defendants were acquitted. The seventh, Corporal Donald Payne, was only convicted because he pleaded guilty to inhuman treatment, and sentenced to 12 months in prison. No one was held responsible for Mousa’s killing or even for allowing the system of torture (for that was what it was: hooding, handcuffing, enforced stress positions, sleep deprivation, beatings) to become an institutionalised practice. Then there was a High Court review, which found that the investigation into Mousa’s death was pathetically inadequate. And after much delay, finally there was a full public inquiry; essentially a careful re-examination of all involved which produced months of transcript and hundreds of witness statements. Picking through all this documentation revealed a story of casual brutality and official unresponsiveness. And yet despite, or perhaps because of, the many legal hearings it was difficult to understand who Baha Mousa was, how he’d been killed, who had been involved, how the investigation and court martial had failed and most of all, why and how it could happen right under the noses of dozens of men and women, officers and other ranks, medic and padre included, without one of them intervening or protesting seriously until it was far too late. A Very British Killing was an attempt to make sense of all this. It became a forensic detective story of sorts. Understanding the ‘devil’ here could only become possible if the detail of the military police investigation and the legal hearings that followed was laid out comprehensibly and with precision. Hopefully that was achieved. But the shame is that ultimately it’s a detective story without resolution. Despite all the available evidence, a damning report at the end of the Baha Mousa Inquiry in 2011, and army generals queuing up to lament this ‘stain on the British Army’ still no one has been brought to book for the killing. Perhaps worse still, the unit established by the Ministry of Defence to investigate allegations of war crimes in Iraq (the Iraq Historic Allegations Team) announced in September 2013 that only now was it pursuing ‘new lines of enquiry’ into Baha Mousa’s death. Despite the mass of detail available from all the cases, reports and inquiries, despite A Very British Killing and the clear identification of all those responsible for the crime, the authorities will not act. Timed no doubt to counter any poor publicity coinciding with the 10th anniversary of Baha Mousa’s death, the statement inflicts another injustice on the family and us all. When A Very British Killing won the George Orwell Prize in May 2013, I wondered what Orwell would have thought about all this. Wouldn’t he have recognised the detachment of so many British army personnel and bureaucrats when faced with the system’s own injustice? Wouldn’t he have thought about his story of a hanging in Burma and hear again the awkward laughter of men who’ve participated, if only as witnesses, in something that is palpably wrong? Wouldn’t he have read the bureaucratic and political language of ‘lines of enquiry’ and ‘learning lessons’ and seen them as ugly and degenerate? I don’t know. But I think he would have agreed that the writing of the story of Baha Mousa’s death and the failure to address the wrong was a necessary act. I think he would have agreed that political writing fuelled by anger is still an essential response. Orwell wrote once that ‘It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.’ His main target then was the evil of totalitarianism. But I would like to think his underlying aim was to challenge indifference to the suffering of others. That for me was the real devil which emerged amidst the detail of my book. The Orwell Prize 2014 opened for entries on the evening of 21st October for books and journalism published in 2013.

The Real George Orwell and the BBC

It’s been a phenomenal week for the Prize and Orwell fans everywhere. The inaugural launch of George Orwell Day on Monday 21st spawned a mass celebration of his works. The Orwell Prize ran a read-in of ‘Politics and the English Language’ by offering the consummate essay to read on our website. While Penguin launched their new covers designed by David Pearson which included a special release of the essay in pamphlet form for just 99p. Lots of newspapers got into the spirit of the event; Shami Chakrabarti told us what she thinks Orwell would have written about today, Prospect Magazine celebrated with their best articles on Orwell, the New Statesman looked back on their encounters with Orwell and Stuart Jeffries of the Guardian asked What would Orwell have made of the world in 2013? The Prize also made friends with a few new fans including BBC 6 Music DJ Lauren Laverne who pointed out to us that her twitter biography quotes Orwell. The excitement continues with the BBC Radio 4 season of ‘The Real George Orwell’ which will run on into February with programmes on Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia, Down and Out in London and Paris and Nineteen Eighty-Four as well as some very special biographical dramatisations of his life. There’s lots of information as well as very interesting blog posts and interviews on the BBC website for the season. The next play is aptly on his time in Burma and will broadcast at 2.15pm today.

The Irrawaddy Literary Festival

We’ll be listening to the BBC’s Burma from Burma as the Orwell Prize has now arrived in Rangoon to set up for the first international literary festival here. From Friday we will be disseminating books raised from the ‘Buy a Book for Burma’ campaign, with generous support from our good friends at Penguin Books. We’re bringing along past Prize winner Timothy Garton Ash as well as our Director Jean Seaton to speak on panels at the festival which will include an Orwell lecture as well as talks on censorship and witnessing violence. We’ll be collecting interviews from writers here as well as capturing the essence of Burma and it’s feel for Orwell all these year’s on, to bring back to you soon.

From the archive

To join in with the festival why not have a read of one of the three novels we will be giving out. The first chapters of Animal Farm, Burmese Days and Nineteen Eighty-Four are all available on our website. You can also find Orwell’s two big essays on his time in Burma as a police officer; ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant‘.

From elsewhere BBC Special

  • Who was the Real George Orwell? Biographer DJ Taylor speculates on the man himself
  • George Orwell and the BBC by Mark Lawson
  • Animal Farm narrated by Tamsin Greig
  • Homage to Catalonia Part 1 starring Joseph Milne as Eric Blair
  • Burma: a biographical play by Mike Walker
  • George Orwell’s resignation letter to the BBC
  • Aung Sun Suu Kyi on BBC Radio 4 desert island discs
  • The diaries

    Don’t forget our other Orwell Diary blogs: his Wartime Diary, Hop-Picking Diary and The Road to Wigan Pier Diary. You can sign up to our newsletter If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on katriona.lewis@mediastandardstrust.org. You can also follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.

    The Orwell Prize and the Green Dragon

    This newsletter was written by Dulcie Lee Last week the Orwell Prize visited The Green Dragon School in Brentford where our Operations Manager held a press conference for 60 nine-year-old delegates on the subject of A day in the life of a journalist. The room was packed with aspiring sports journalists, news reporters and foreign correspondents emerging with very interesting and thoughtful questions. Questions like; where does news come from, how do you start writing a feature, what kinds of different jobs are there for journalists to do and how do I become a journalist? Mr Veazey, the teacher who oversaw the morning, said “It was incredible to have The Orwell Prize visit, the children were so engaged and inspired. It made journalism real for them, explaining the ins and outs of the industry and they are desperate to find out more” After the press conference, the children were eager to discuss what they had learnt; one budding journalist said “I’m going to watch the news more often now!” and several decided they wanted to become a reporter. The nine-year-olds will be using the press conference to support a school project. Mr Veazey told us, “The children are now creating their own magazine, using some of the techniques that were discussed last week.” Only last month, during an episode of Radio 4’s Great Lives, Alan Johnson MP spoke to winner of the 2005 Orwell Prize for Journalism, Matthew Paris, saying “I wish I’d put Orwell on the national curriculum”. During the programme, Mr Johnson recalled purchasing Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying at age 14 and attributed it as the catalyst for his political awakening. During last year’s Orwell lecture, Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, also said “I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have become a journalist were it not for George Orwell.”

    2013 launch

    The launch of the Orwell Prize 2013 – our 20th birthday year – will take place on the evening of Wednesday 24th October at the Frontline Club. There will be a launch debate as well as several exciting announcements about the Orwell Prize in 2013. To reserve your free place RSVP now to katriona.lewis@mediastandardstrust.org

    From the archive

    Yesterday was World Homeless Day. Much of Orwell’s work focused on the working class and homeless people in society and in 1928 and 1929 Orwell wrote three articles as part of ‘An Inquiry into “Civic Progress” in England’. Two of the three articles were ‘A Day in the Life of a Tramp’ and ‘Beggars in London’ in which he discuss the timeless issues surrounding homelessness. Orwell’s experiences of homelessness in London and Paris would lead him to write his book Down and Out in Paris and London four years later. You can read the first chapter of Down and Out in Paris and London here. ‘Shooting an Elephant’, the essay in which Orwell explores an experience from his time in Burma, was broadcast on the BBC Home Service on 12th October 1948. The essay, which is available on our website, became one of a collection of Orwell’s works on Burma. As well as ‘A Hanging’, Orwell wrote several preliminary sketches on Burma that would later be used to form his book Burmese Days. You can read the first chapter of the Burmese Days here.

    From elsewhere

  • Camilla Cavendish, 2012 Journalism Prize longlister, has written a fantastic piece for The Times discussing the modern influx of tribal career politicians and their unwillingness to tackle the bigger societal issues
  • 2011 Journalism Prize longlister, Dominic Lawson, wrote an insightful article on the politics surrounding abortion laws for The Independent
  • Yesterday Daniel Finkelstein, 2012 Journalism Prize shortlister, wrote a brilliant piece highlighting the importance of the economy in the next election for The Times
  • The Independent are running a competition to win the top 10 books in the Everyman’s Library, including Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
  • The wartime diaries

    This week’s entries was published on 10th and 11th October 1942. Next week’s entry will be published on 15th October 1942. Don’t forget our other Orwell Diary blogs: his Hop-Picking Diary and The Road to Wigan Pier Diary. You can sign up to our newsletter If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on katriona.lewis@mediastandardstrust.org. You can also follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.

    The Sporting Spirit

    The London 2012 Olympic games has dominated all UK media outlets for the last fortnight. At the time of writing a Journalisted search reveals that since the opening ceremony there have been 6,427 articles published in the national press. We know from letters home to his Mother that the young George Orwell enjoyed sport at school. In fact, Orwell expert Peter Davison says that at that point it is difficult to guage whether he would become internationally famous as a goalkeeper or a writer. In Bernard Crick’s biography George Orwell: A Life he points out that at Orwell’s Prep school, St Cyprians, the academic scores were mixed with success in team sports as if they were seemingly equal importance. He said that ‘this weird synthesis of team spirit and individual competitiveness could truly be said to epitomize the blending of a capitalist and an aristocratic ethic’. Over time Orwell developed his own perspective of parallels between sport and politics. In 1945, three years before the last time London hosted the Olympic games, The Tribune published ‘The Sporting Spirit’ which revealed his repugnance for the evolution of competitive sport; “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.” Peter Davison explores this further in his essay ‘Orwell and Sport’.

    Letchworth 2012

    It gives us great pleasure to announce that we will be returning to the Letchworth Orwell Festival in September for a debate celebrating the 75th anniversary of The Road to Wigan Pier. The subject for discussion is ‘Poverty then and now: Orwell and his successors’ and we are very fortunate to have a wonderful set of speakers. The panel is made up of author of Road to Wigan Pier Revisited, Stephen Armstrong; Dr Michael Sayeau a member of the Board of trustees for the Orwell Archive at UCL; Director of Befriend a Family, Jacqueline Crooks; 2012 Orwell Prize for Books shortlistee Gavin Knight. They will be chaired by Katriona Lewis, Operations Manager of The Orwell Prize. You can see more information about the event and how to book tickets here.

    From the archive

    Orwell’s essay, ‘A hanging’ was first published in The Adelphi in August 1931. The piece is set in Burma where Orwell was stationed as an officer from 1922 and describes the execution of a criminal. Orwell’s experiences in Burma after Eton formed the basis for his 1934 novel Burmese Days. On our website you can find Emma Larkin’s introduction to Burmese Days, Douglas Kerr on Orwell, Kipling and the Empire as well as a video of our own What next for Burma? 2010 launch debate and much much more.

    From elsewhere

  • We had a fantastic response to last week’s guest post by Rangers Tax-Case on ‘writing politics’. Standby for many more guestposts by friends of The Orwell Prize including Stephen Armstrong and Toby Harnden
  • Earlier this week Scottish writer Gerry Hassan wrote a piece in praise of investigative journalism on the football scandal for The Scotsman
  • .

  • This week Orwell Prize for Books longlistee wrote a comment piece for The Guardian on London Mayor Boris Johnson’s mishap with a zip line
  • 2008 winner of The Orwell Prize for Books, Raja Shehadeh celebrated the release of his latest book Occupation Diaries which tells tales of life on the West Bank. You can read a review here
  • Yesterday it was National Book Lovers Day and we received dozens of wonderful tweets from followers telling us their favourite Orwell novel. We were particularly pleased that the usually less noticed Keep the Aspidistra Flying was well sited with a ‘#Comstock!’ tag. Below you can see some of our Media Standards Trust favourites.
  • The wartime diaries

    This week’s entries were published on 7th, 9th, 10th and 12th August 1942. Next week’s entry will be published on 14th, 18th and 19th August 1942. Don’t forget our other Orwell Diary blogs: his Hop-Picking Diary and The Road to Wigan Pier Diary. If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on katriona.lewis@mediastandardstrust.org. You can also follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.

    Burmese Days

    This week Myanmar democracy advocate and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi became the first non-head of state to address both houses of Britain’s parliament. “We have an opportunity to re-establish true democracy in Burma. It is an opportunity for which we have waited decades,” she said. It is therefore wonderfully appropriate that Orwell’s first novel Burmese Days was published first in the UK 77 years ago on Sunday. Set in a 1920s Burma undergoing waning imperialism, the novel was inspired by Orwell’s time as a police officer there. You can read more about Burmese Days including the first chapter on our website. In 2010 we launch the Prize on the debate What next for Burma? you can watch a video of the event here.

    Buxton Festival 2012

    We’re so excited to be returning to Buxton on 16th July. For 2012 we’ll be taking Paul Anderson, Jan Montifiore, Charles Allen, Tony Wright and Stuart Evers to row about who is the better writer; Orwell or Kipling. You can see full details on our website.

    From the archive

    Since today is Take Your Dog to Work Day. We’re reading Orwell’s essay A hanging. Also set in Burma, the piece describes a scene in which a criminal is executed. Just as they are ready to begin the hanging a dog wonders into the courtyard in front of the crowd; “It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale, half pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.” You can read the full piece on our website.

    From elsewhere

  • Congratulations to Paul Lewis for his win at the Online Media Awards for the Best Twitter Feed. Paul was shortlisted for this year’s Orwell Prize for Journalism, you can read his submitted pieces on our website.
  • The Guardian have produced an eBook of Amelia Gentleman’s Orwell Prize winning features.
  • As part of their ‘A brief summary of the short story’ series yesterday The Guardian focused on Rudyard Kipling which might be an especially good read in the lead up to our event at Buxton.

  • The wartime diaries

    This week’s entries were published on 21st and 24th June 1942. Next week’s entry will be published on 26th June 1942. Don’t forget our other Orwell Diary blogs: his Hop-Picking Diary and The Road to Wigan Pier Diary. If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on katriona.lewis@mediastandardstrust.org. You can also follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.

    Orwell on Stage

    This week’s newsletter is full of drama, with a number of theatrical productions based on Orwell (and the Prize) to tell you about. Next week, the drama society of UCL’s student union will be presenting a version of 1984 at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London, ‘with a cast of 25 actors, live music (composed by Max Wilson), big screen film projections, and pulsating physicality’. The show runs from Thursday 23rd until Saturday 25th February. You can book tickets on the Bloomsbury Theatre website, or take a look at the poster for the show (which made us think of D. J. Taylor’s short essay on Orwell and rats). From 9 March, the DV8 physical theatre company will be presenting ‘Can We Talk About This?’ at the National Theatre. The company used a transcript from one of our previous events, ‘What can’t you speak about in the 21st Century?’ with Timothy Garton Ash, Mehdi Hasan and Douglas Murray, in making the show. And some advance notice: Peter Cordwell and Carl Picton will present ‘One Georgie Orwell’, a unique Orwell cabaret, at London’s Greenwich Theatre from Thursday 26 April until Sunday 29 April. You can find some of the songs on YouTube.

    Job advert: Orwell Prize administrator

    We’re advertising for a new Orwell Prize administrator. You can find the advert on the w4mp website, on the Orwell Prize website, and on the Media Standards Trust website. But hurry – we’re only accepting applications until the end of today!

    Entries for the Orwell Prize 2012

    The full list of entries, for the Book PrizeJournalism Prize and Blog Prizecan be found on our website. And you can find out more about this year’s judges, too.

    At the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2012

    We’ll be at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival for a fifth year, with three events. Click on the event titles for full details, to book and to read some relevant Orwell essays:

    • Homage to Catalonia: the Spanish Civil War, 2pm, Friday 30 March: Helen Graham, Paul Preston, Francisco Romero Salvado, chaired by Jean Seaton
    • The Road to Wigan Pier: 75 years on, 6.30pm, Saturday 31 March: Stephen Armstrong, Beatrix Campbell, Juliet Gardiner, Paul Mason, chaired by D. J. Taylor
    • Politics and the Press, 4pm, Sunday 1 April: Gaby Hinsliff, Martin Moore, Lance Price, chaired by Jean Seaton

    Nineteen Eighty-Four at Foyles

    The Foyles Café at Foyles Bookshop, Charing Cross Road is currently exhibiting some of Aleks Krotoski’s photographs inspired by Nineteen Eighty-Four. Aleks spent just over a year telling the first 369 words of the novel, one word at a time, in photographs. You can see the full set of images on her Flickr stream, and you can buy some of the images via her online storeMore on the novel on our site.

    From the archive

    Since the play’s the thing, or rather the plays are the thing, this week… In his essay on ‘Orwell’s London’, Gordon Bowker writes about the young Orwell’s love of musical theatre. We also have ‘Free Will’, a one-act script from a slightly older Orwell, written in 1920. Dominic Cavendish, who has adapted Coming Up for Air‘Shooting an Elephant’‘A Hanging’ and a scene from Nineteen Eighty-Four for the stage, has written about adapting Orwell, and we also have Alan Cox reading one of Orwell’s preliminary sketches for Burmese Days as adapted by Dominic (‘An Incident in Rangoon’). It was Valentine’s Day this week. A couple of love poems – or rather, love-related poems – from Orwell for you: ‘My Love and I’ and ‘Romance’. Much more on Orwell and poetry in, unsurprisingly, our Orwell and poetry section – poems by Orwell, essays about poetry by Orwell, and an essay on poetry and Orwell. And first published this week: from 15 February 1946, Orwell’s ‘Decline of the English Murder’.

    From elsewhere

    The Wartime Diaries

    The next entry will be published on 14th March. Don’t forget our other Orwell Diary blogs: his Hop-Picking Diary and The Road to Wigan Pier Diary. If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org or follow us on Twitter. And you can subscribe to this newsletter via email.

    Launch 2012, ‘Writing the Riots’

    The Orwell Prize 2012 will open for entries on Wednesday 9th November following a debate about ‘Writing the Riots’ at the Frontline Club in London. Artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre Nicolas Kent, previously shortlisted journalists Paul Lewis and Mary Riddell, and award-winning novelist Alex Wheatle will talk about the riots over the summer and the process of writing about them. There’ll be drinks from 6.30, the announcement of this year’s judges at 7pm and then the discussion itself. If you’d like to book a free place, please email gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org, and please do share the invitation with friends. Entries open on the 9th November and remain open until 18th January 2012, for all work published in 2011. Full entry details and entry forms will be available on our website from the 9th, and if you have any further queries, please get in touch. This year’s longlists will be announced on 28th March 2012, the shortlists on 25th April, and the winners at our awards ceremony on 23rd May – put those dates in your diary now!

    George Orwell Memorial Lecture 2011

    Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of Guardian News and Media, will be speaking on ‘Hacking away at the truth: an investigation and its consequences’ on 10th November at 6pm. Email events@bbk.ac.uk to book a free place, or visit our website for more information. The Orwell Lecture is organised by the Orwell Trust with Birkbeck College, University of London.

    From the archive

    Burmese Days was published for the first time on 25 October 1934 (and in the United States rather than the United Kingdom). There’s lots on our site about Orwell and Burma: his preliminary sketches for Burmese Days, including ‘An Incident in Rangoon’ (also read by Alan Cox), with an introduction by Peter Davison; his famous essays, ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’, and the less well-known ‘How a Nation is Exploited: The British Empire in Burma’; two reviews of books on Burma by Orwell; extracts from Emma Larkin’s introduction to Burmese Days and her Finding George Orwell in Burma; an essay by Douglas Kerr on ‘Orwell, Kipling and Empire’ and by Liam Hunt on ‘Why Orwell Went to Burma’; photojournalist Julio Etchart’s ‘Burmese Days Revisited’; and a UCL podcast featuring Orwell archivist Gill Furlong, stage producer Ryan Kiggell and our director Jean Seaton. You can also watch our 2010 launch debate, ‘what next for Burma?’; our Oxford 2010 debate on ‘the future of Burma’; and our Q&A with the producers of Dispatches: Orphans of Burma’s Cyclone. Tribune magazine – of which Orwell was literary editor – was set to close, but may now have been saved. Some of Orwell’s finest essays were published by Tribune, including ‘Can Socialists Be Happy?’ by ‘John Freeman’ (believed to be Orwell); ‘You and the Atom Bomb’; ‘Good Bad Books’; ‘The Sporting Spirit’; ‘Freedom and Happiness’, a review of Zamyatin’s We; ‘Pleasure Spots’; ‘Books vs. Cigarettes’; ‘Decline of the English Murder’; ‘In Front of Your Nose’; ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’; and ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’. This April, former Tribune editor, Paul Anderson, lined up with Sarah Bakewell to argue Orwell’s merits against Rudyard Kipling (represented by Charles Allen and Andrew Lycett). Meanwhile Conrad Landin, who has interviewed both Richard Blair and Michael Foot about Orwell, has set up a ‘Save Tribune’ Facebook group. And don’t forget – you can watch Jose Harris, Owen Jones and Shiv Malik debating ‘Victorian Values’, and Graeme Archer and Oliver Kamm debating political blogging at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on our website.

    From elsewhere

    The Wartime Diaries

    The next entry will be published on 14th March.

    The Hop-Picking Diaries

    The final entry was published on 8th October.

    The Wigan Pier Diaries

    The final entry was published on 25th March. If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org or follow us on Twitter. And you can subscribe to this newsletter via email.

    Orwell, Raffles and Gulliver

    We’re very pleased to bring you two new Orwell essays this week. First up is ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, first published in October 1944. In it, Orwell compares the crime stories featuring gentleman thief Raffles from the early 20th Century with the more modern crime story No Orchids for Miss Blandish: ‘What I am concerned with here is the immense difference in moral atmosphere between the two books, and the change in the popular attitude that this probably implies.’ We’ve also just published one of Orwell’s most famous essays of literary criticism: ‘Politics vs. Literature: An examination of Gulliver’s Travels’, first published in Polemic’s September/October 1946 issue.

    The Orwell Prize at Cheltenham THIS WEEKEND

    There are still some tickets left for our events at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival this weekend:

    Hopefully see you there!

    George Orwell Memorial Lecture 2011

    Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of Guardian News and Media, will be speaking on ‘Hacking away at the truth: an investigation and its consequences’ on 10th November at 6pm. For full details of how to book and video of previous Orwell Lectures, go to our website. The Orwell Lecture is organised by the Orwell Trust with Birkbeck College, University of London.

    From the archive

    ‘Shooting an Elephant’, one of Orwell’s most famous essays, was broadcast on the BBC Home Service on 12th October 1948. You can read it on our website, along with other works from Orwell’s time in Burma, including ‘A Hanging’ and Orwell’s preliminary sketches for what would become Burmese Days. We also have a (rather unseasonal!) transcript of one of Orwell’s radio broadcasts, the Christmas edition of the poetry magazine show, Voice, while his essay ‘Poetry and the Microphone’ looks in more depth at the broadcasting of poetry on the radio. On twitter this week, Foyles Bookshop wondered if Christopher Hitchens, shortlisted for this year’s Orwell Prize for his Hitch-22, was the finest English language essayist since Orwell. You can read the first chapter of Hitch-22 on our site, and lots of Orwell’s essays via our ‘By Orwell’ section. Last Monday was World Mental Health Day. Our 2010 Book Prize winner, Keeper by Andrea Gillies, was about caring for a sufferer of Alzheimer’s – you can read the first chapter and an interview with Andrea by shortlisted journalist Amelia Gentleman, view photographs from ‘Inside a dementia ward’ with Andrea’s words, or watch Andrea in conversation about her book. And you can read one of Patrick Cockburn’s Journalism Prize-winning pieces from 2009, ‘My son, the schizophrenic’.

    From elsewhere

    The Wartime Diaries

    The next entry will be published on 14th March.

    The Hop-Picking Diaries

    The final entry was published on 8th October.

    The Wigan Pier Diaries

    The final entry was published on 25th March. If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org or follow us on Twitter. And you can subscribe to this newsletter via email.

    Orwell in Defence of P. G. Wodehouse

    The British author P. G. Wodehouse, best known for his Jeeves and Wooster stories, was in the news recently with the release of his MI5 files. A contemporary of Orwell’s, Wodehouse was interned by the Nazis in 1941 and controversially broadcast from Nazi Germany.

    We’re very pleased to be able to bring you Orwell’s essay on the matter, ‘In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse’, on our website.
    We’re very grateful to the Orwell Estate and Penguin Books for letting us publish it on our website, along with many other Orwell works, which you can read in our ‘By Orwell’ section.
    And if you’re a Wodehouse fan, BBC2 are showing a programme tonight at 9pm, Wogan on Wodehouse.

    Orwell Prize at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival

    From the archive

    Pinch, punch, first of the month – and a chance to return to some Orwell essays first published in September. For now, we have ‘Shooting an Elephant’, about Orwell’s time in Burma, from 1936; and ‘The Art of Donald McGill’, on seaside postcard humour, from 1941.
    Lady Bingham, widow of this year’s Book Prize winner, Tom Bingham, wrote to us this week to say: ‘You will be delighted to know that a friend had her copy of The Rule of Law confiscated by Syrian customs officials’. You can read the first chapter on our website.

    From elsewhere

    The Wartime Diaries

    Over the last week, entries were published on 28th August.

    The next entry will be published on 14th March.

    The Hop-Picking Diaries

    Over the last week, entries were published on 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, 29th and 30th August.
    The next entry will be published on 18th September.

    The Wigan Pier Diaries

    The final entry was published on 25th March. If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org or follow us on Twitter. And you can subscribe to this newsletter via email.

    Buxton Festival video

    You can now watch video of our debate at the Buxton Festival, ‘is politics corrupted by corrupted language?’, on our website and YouTube channel. The line-up was slightly different from that advertised, with journalists Colette Douglas-Home (columnist, The Herald) and Mark Douglas-Home (former editor, The Herald) joining Linda Grant (Orange Prize-winning and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, books include the recent We Had It So Good) and Matthew Parris (journalist and former MP, winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2005, previously shortlisted for Chance Witness). Dame Janet Smith, High Court judge and chair of the Buxton Festival, presided over the discussion. Nick Cohen (journalist and author, previously shortlisted for What’s Left? and longlisted for Waiting for the Etonians) sadly had to pull out. Video of our previous events at Buxton – Andrea Gillies in conversation with her publisher Rebecca Nicolson, Andrew Brown in conversation with David Blunkett MP, a debate on Orwell vs Dickens, and a discussion on ‘what makes a good political novel?’ – can be found in our events archive.

    Johann Hari

    You may be aware of allegations made about the winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2008, Johann Hari, which have been investigated by our governing Council of the Orwell Prize. You can read the latest statement on our website.

    From the archive

    There’s been a lot of discussion about the death penalty this week, with the relaunch of the UK government’s e-petitions website. Orwell wrote about capital punishment in one of his most famous essays, ‘A Hanging’, which you can read on our website. Orwell was quoted in the final edition of the News of the World, which was shut down in response to the phone-hacking scandal. (Nick Davies, who has been leading The Guardian’s investigations into phone-hacking, was longlisted for his Flat Earth News in 2009.) The quote came from Orwell’s ‘Decline of the English Murder’, which is on our website, and you can also read The Observer’s Robert McCrum on the paper’s use of Orwell’s quote. Orwell biographer D. J. Taylor wrote about Orwell’s essay and the NotW for The Independent.

    From elsewhere

    The Wartime Diaries

    The next entry will be published on 28th August.

    The Wigan Pier Diary

    The final entry was published on 25th March. In addition to the blog, we have a Google Map tracking Orwell’s journey, a flickr set of archive images, and our page on The Road to Wigan Pier, with the first chapter and other links. We’ll have some more exciting Orwell diary news soon… If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org or follow us on Twitter. And you can subscribe to this newsletter via email.

    Happy Birthday, George!

    George Orwell was born on 25th June 1903, so tomorrow (Saturday) would have been his 108th birthday. You could celebrate with a birthday cake – perhaps made from one of Orwell’s own recipes. His unpublished 1946 essay, ‘British Cookery’, features a recipe for treacle tart and one for plum cake (as well as Christmas pudding and a controversial marmalade). You can read the full essay on our website, or view the original typescript in our flickr stream.

    Buxton Festival, 13th July

    To mark the 65th anniversary of Orwell’s essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, we’ll be asking ‘is politics corrupted by corrupted language?’ at this year’s Buxton Festival, on 13th July at 10.30am. Our panel will consist of Nick Cohen (journalist and author, previously shortlisted for What’s Left? and longlisted for Waiting for the Etonians), Linda Grant (Orange Prize-winning and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, books include the recent We Had It So Good) and Matthew Parris (journalist and former MP, winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2005, previously shortlisted for Chance Witness). Tickets are available from the Festival website. And you can watch our previous events at Buxton –Andrea Gillies in conversation with her publisher Rebecca Nicolson, Andrew Brown in conversation with David Blunkett MP, a debate on Orwell vs Dickens, and a discussion on ‘what makes a good political novel?’ – in our events archive.

    From the archive

    Burmese Days was published for the first time in the UK on this day in 1935. As you’d expect, there’s plenty about the book on our Burmese Days page, including the first chapter. We have Orwell’s preliminary sketches for Burmese Days (including ‘An Incident in Rangoon’, which reads like a short story – and we have video of it being read by actor Alan Cox); two of his major essays, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’; and plenty about the book from editor Peter Davison, academic Douglas Kerr and author and journalist Emma Larkin, among others. There’s also video of our own events on contemporary Burma, including our 2010 launch debate. This week is Independent Booksellers’ Week in the UK, so it’s a good time to revisit Orwell’s ‘Bookshop Memories’, about his own experience of bookselling. Two other Orwell essays, ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’ and ‘Good Bad Books’, might also be worth reading.

    From elsewhere

    The Wartime Diaries

    Over the last week, entries were published on 19th, 20th, 22nd and 23rd June. Over the next week, entries will be published on 30th June.

    The Wigan Pier Diaries

    The final entry was published on 25th March. In addition to the blog, we have a Google Map tracking Orwell’s journey, a flickr set of archive images, and our page on The Road to Wigan Pier, with the first chapter and other links. If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org or follow us on Twitter. And you can subscribe to this newsletter via email.

    Taiwan Orwell conference calls for papers

    A call for papers from ‘George Orwell: Asian and Global Perspectives’, a conference to be held at Tunghai University, Taiwan on 21st May 2011. If you’d like any furhter information, please contact Dr Henk Vynckier, chair of the conference.

    George Orwell: Asian and Global Perspectives

    Conference Location

    Department of Foreign Languages and Literature Tunghai University Taichung 40704, Taiwan

    Date

    May 21, 2011

    Conference Theme

    George Orwell: Asian and Global Perspectives In his The Public Intellectuals (2001), Richard Posner ranks Orwell 11th in a list of the 100 most-mentioned intellectuals of the 20th century (depending on coverage in the media, internet “hits” and citations in academic journals).  Yet, while Orwell’s status in Britain, the US, and the West generally speaking, is beyond question, his place in Asian and other non-Western cultural discourse seems less certain. Orwell, nevertheless, is profoundly linked to and deserving of consideration in the Asian cultural context.  He was born in Bengal, served five years in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, and returned from the experience a firm anti-colonialist.  Already in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), he reflected on the fate of Indian rickshaw pullers and gharry ponies while discussing his experiences as a dishwasher in a Paris hotel and such texts as “A Hanging”, “Shooting an Elephant” and Burmese Days have become classics of English colonial literature.  From 1941-1943 he was employed by the Indian section of the BBC’s Eastern Service and took a keen interest throughout his life in the question of Indian independence, the future of Palestine, decolonization throughout Asia and around the world, and new English writings from Asia. As 2010 is an Orwell commemorative year, it presents a good opportunity to further Orwell scholarship in an Asian as well as global context.  From raucous democracies to hermit kingdoms, contemporary Asia features varied societal and political models and George Orwell’s writings consequently have been received very differently from country to country.  In Myanmar, the former Burma, Burmese Days (1934) is hailed as a first-class anti-colonial document, but Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the rest of his works are banned.  Yet, elsewhere his work is freely available both in English and in translation (e.g. in Taiwan) and George Orwell, by the Japanese academic Yasuhara Okuyama (Tokyo, 1983), made a significant contribution to Orwell scholarship and included original interviews with Orwell contemporaries. We invite papers exploring the following topics, but also welcome presentations dealing with other aspects of Orwell scholarship:

    • The reception history of Orwell in Asian countries
    • Translation, adaptation, and refraction of Orwell in Asia
    • Orwell’s ‘decency’ and Asian values
    • Orwell’s views of war, colonialism, and totalitarianism
    • Orwell on patriotism vs. nationalism
    • Orwell and India
    • Orwell as Orientalist: Images of Asia (Burma, India, China, Japan, etc) in Orwell
    • Orwell on Language: ‘Politics and the English/Chinese/Japanese/etc. Language’
    • The telescreen and the evolution of the mass media, the Internet and surveillance technology
    • Orwell as public intellectual and Asian public intellectuals
    • The teaching of Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four and other Orwell texts in the English Literature classroom in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, etc.

    Conference/Paper Language

    All papers are required to be written and presented in English.

    Guidelines for Abstract Submission

    • The length of the abstract should be maximum 350 words
    • Abstracts should be typed in fonts of size 12 and spacing of 1.5 and saved in MS Word format
    • Do not include your name or other identifying information in your abstract; there will be a blind review of the submissions
    • Send the abstract by e-mail to hvynck@thu.edu.tw
    • Please use ‘Abstract for George Orwell: Asian and Global Perspectives’ as the subject of your email message
    • Include information regarding academic affiliation of presenter(s) in email.

    Important Dates

    • Due date for abstract submission:  Dec. 30, 2010
    • Notification of abstract acceptance:  Jan. 15, 2011
    • Due date for full paper submission: May 9, 2011
    • Deadline for registration: May 16, 2011

    Contact Information

    Phone Number: 04-2359 0121 Ext. 31200 Sherry Jan (Assistant) Fax: 04-23594002 E-mail: sj1109@thu.edu.tw (Assistant Sherry Jan) or hvynck@thu.edu.tw (Dr. Henk Vynckier, Chair)