The Burgess Foundation and the Orwell Prize present a special event looking at dystopian visions of the future. Taking as a starting-point George Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare Nineteen Eighty-Four and Anthony Burgess’s ominously prescient fictions 1985, The Wanting Seed and A Clockwork Orange, writers and critics Eleanor Byrne (MMU), Kaye Mitchell (University of Manchester) and Michael Sayeau (UCL, the Orwell Archive) discuss these powerful texts and more, and look at what dystopias mean for us today.
The Orwell Foundation