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Actor Alan Cox performs ‘An Incident in Rangoon’, one of Orwell’s preliminary sketches for Burmese Days. Adapted by Dominic Cavendish, exclusively for the Orwell Prize Launch 2010: What next for Burma?

Video

Alan Cox is a respected actor on stage and screen. Before attending LAMDA, he appeared as a young John Mortimer in A Voyage Round My Father (opposite Sir Laurence Olivier) and as Young Watson in Young Sherlock Holmes. He recently played David Frost in the US national tour of Frost/Nixon (and was nominated for a Helen Hayes Award) and appeared as George Orwell and O’Brien in Orwell: A Celebration during summer 2009.

Dominic Cavendish is comedy critic for the Daily Telegraph as well as its deputy theatre critic, and has written on theatre and the arts for The Independent, Time Out and The Big Issue. He is also the founder of theatreVOICE. In 2008, he adapted George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air as a one-man show (starring Hal Cruttenden) at the Edinburgh Festival; it also formed the basis for summer 2009’s Orwell: A Celebration, for which Dominic also adapted ‘A Hanging’, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and part of 1984.

• George Orwell: Rudyard Kipling (1936)
• George Orwell: Rudyard Kipling (1942)
• Oxford 2011: Orwell vs Kipling

One of the greatest of modern British writers was an Englishman who was born in India. He was privately educated in England, did not go to university, and returned to the East to work after leaving school. Empire, and the relation between those in authority and those under authority, became one of the principal themes of his writing, both in journalism and in fiction. He lived by his pen, and made a name as an author of strong political convictions. Many of his stories and phrases have embedded themselves in the English language and the consciousness of its users, even of those who have never actually read his work. Both admired and hated in his own lifetime, his genius made him a spokesman and a symbol in the great ideological contentions of modern times, and after his death he was considered not only an important writer, but also but a particular embodiment of the character of his country.

Well actually, not one of the greatest of modern British writers. Two of the greatest of modern British writers.

Orwell and Kipling emerge – and I think are beginning to emerge, even in the academic discourse of English literature – as giant figures, or twinned heraldic animals like the lion and the unicorn, of modern British writing. And though our first instinct is to think of them as opposites, the curious similarities between them proliferate. Both of them were patriots, though highly critical of their fellow-countrymen and frequently of their government. Both were public intellectuals who used their writing to raise political consciousness. Both loved animals and wrote books about them, and both had a strong feeling for the English countryside.

Both were men of principle, but they were also realists in the sense of a non-theoretical empiricism. They were both impatient with orthodoxy and theory. Orwell’s disgust at W. H. Auden’s glib phrase about “the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder” – “It could only be written,” Orwell said, “by a person to whom murder is at most a word” (XII, 103) – reminds me a little of Kipling’s rage at liberals like “Pagett M.P.” who pontificated about India without bothering to learn about it [1]. Both attitudes, to be sure, have something of the smugness of a man of the world, playing the trump card of experience.

Importantly – this is part of what makes them modern – both had a global vision. Though Orwell at one point kept a village shop, and Kipling for years impersonated a country gentleman at Burwash, they were the opposite of provincial. Both of them were exasperated by British (English?) insularity. “What do they know of England, who only England know?” was Kipling’s lament that his neighbours knew and cared so little about their achievements, and obligations, in the wide world. Orwell agreed about the ignorance. He pointed out that most ordinary people at home had no idea or understanding of the fact that their whole economic way of life depended on Britain’s “coolie empire” overseas. His words, though brutally phrased, have a resonance for those of us who enjoy a more modern form of globalization. “We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue” (XIII, 153). This comes from his Horizon essay on Kipling (1942), one of the best he wrote.

Kipling and Orwell were citizens of the world. But the origin of this cosmopolitanism was rather different in their two cases. For Kipling, it was a function of empire. He travelled all over it, he came to think of himself as its bard, and though he was an acute observer of its local differences, he also found it everywhere the same. The empire he knew or imagined was a world network of power, hierarchical relationships, security and welfare. Globally diffused, it had little to do any more with the European island that had given birth to it. Sometimes when he speaks of it, he makes it sound like the United Nations. Empire was something the African bushman and the Himalayan hillgirl and the Irish infantryman had in common. It was, at its most exalted, a global moral force. At its core, of course, for Kipling, was the authority and duty of white people, the “white man’s burden”. Kipling’s empire was a vision of the world, a global Utopia, but it was a racially understood and organized world, under white government. Like his friend Cecil Rhodes, he continued to hope that the United States would re-federate with the British Empire (perhaps after a handsome apology on both sides?) and rule the world.

Orwell, of course, did not recognize that empire in the least, except as a foreshadowing of the terrible warring superpowers envisaged in Nineteen Eighty Four. His own global vision derived from his socialism, which is always a kind of internationalism. That was what gave him a feeling of kinship with the Italian militiaman he describes meeting in the opening pages of Homage to Catalonia; and it was that sense of the world that had brought him to fight with the POUM militia in Spain, among people with whom, admittedly, he had very little in common and whose speech he could hardly understand. It was the betrayal of that internationalism, first in Barcelona and later everywhere else, that most disgusted him about Stalin and the regime he ruled in a country that had the word “socialist” in its name. From opposite ends of the political spectrum, Orwell and Kipling were globalists. There was nothing narrow about either of them. They could see the whole picture.

The similarities are intriguing. The differences, of course, were polar. “It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person,” Orwell writes (XIII, 151). Kipling was an imperialist – though not a fascist (his outlook was “prefascist”, says Orwell carefully). Orwell was anti-imperialist; in fact his entire politics was erected on the emotional experience of his service in Burma as a policeman of the British Empire, and it was when he came to understand the relation between that, and what he saw and experienced in Spain, that the Orwellian politics emerged in its mature form. He was prepared to argue that some of what empire did was for the good: what it was, however, was indefensible.

There were personal and aesthetic differences as well as ideological ones. Kipling was brilliant and precocious, doing some of his best work in his twenties. He had his unhappiness, but I think he never doubted his imaginative and creative powers. He would not have understood Orwell’s gloomy statement that writing a book was like undergoing an illness. Orwell’s genius was entirely prosaic, he was a slow starter, diffident and often clumsy, always disappointed with his own work, the kind of writer for whom every book was doomed to be, in T. S. Eliot’s words, a different kind of failure. I don’t know that Kipling ever read anything written by Orwell. When Orwell criticizes Kipling’s work, he objects to his ideas, but also repeatedly to his vulgarity, and this is a complaint that probably has its roots in Eton rather than on the road to Wigan Pier. But one thing that the 1942 essay shows very clearly is that Orwell knew Kipling’s writing very well indeed. [2]

This is hardly surprising. For a boy of Orwell’s class and generation, and especially for one whose father actually worked for the Government of India, Kipling was the author of childhood. First The Just So Stories, then the Jungle Books, Puck of Pook’s Hill, Rewards and Fairies, Kim, Stalky and Co…. Not just a favourite on the nursery bookshelf, Kipling was the author of childhood for the sons (daughters too) of empire in a wider sense; they experienced the world through his eyes, and Kipling’s books helped them to see and relate to the important things in their environment – animals, the natural world, home, parents and other adults, jokes and games, friends, school, and later more abstract issues, like duty, work, country, masculinity and femininity.

When the young Eric Blair, fresh from school, went to Burma to serve in the police, he was going to a place that Kipling had more or less invented for the benefit of his fellow-countrymen: they knew about the Orient, and Orientals, through him. Leonard Woolf, who belonged to the generation between Kipling and Orwell, went to work as a colonial official in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1904, and found the place uncannily familiar. It was Kipling country. Woolf said he could not decide whether Kipling had been brilliantly accurate in his description of the British in the East, or whether by now the British in the East modelled themselves on Kipling’s characters. [3]

Orwell too must have felt a sense of déjà vu in the “Kipling-haunted clubs” of British Burma. Kipling is a ghostly background figure in “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant”, and above all in Burmese Days. The racist mediocrities who hang out in the club at Kyauktada are Kipling characters, stripped of the glamour and charm with which Kipling invested them. But Veraswami, the comically pro-British Indian doctor, is a variation on a theme by Kipling too, and so is the wily and corrupt U Po Kyin. As for the central character Flory, his local mistress, his white fiancée, his enjoyment of the jungle, his sporting activities, his close friendship with an Indian, his moment of heroism during a riot, his disgrace, and his eventual suicide, all have identifiable precedents in Kipling. One thing you do not find in Kipling, though, is the central theme of Burmese Days, an Englishman in the East who has lost his faith in empire.

A knowledge of Kipling helps us to understand Orwell, for no writer was more important to him, as an influence, example, and antagonist. In some sense Orwell’s whole life was a conversation, or quarrel, with Kipling. He seemed to acknowledge this when he wrote, when Kipling died, “I worshipped [him] at thirteen, loathed him at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty, despised him at twenty-five and now again rather admire him” (X, 409).

But a knowledge of Orwell also helps us to understand Kipling, in a number of ways. In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, T. S. Eliot talks about how, when a new literary work appears on the scene, every existing work is modified by it and the whole scene subtly rearranged. Thus, we can’t really read Kipling’s stories of the Raj in the same way once we have read Burmese Days. Though Kipling’s words are unchanged, the Orwell novel has changed how we read them.

Kipling, who died in 1936, did not know that the empire he loved would disappear within a lifetime. So in a sense we know more about the British Empire than Kipling did, because we know what was to happen to it. The one thing Kipling seems not to have been able to imagine was an alternative to empire. But if we know Orwell, we know the work of someone who devoted his whole writing lifetime to answering the question of what such an alternative might look like, and how – and how difficult it would be – to achieve it.

Notes

Douglas Kerr is Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Wilfred Owen’s Voices (Clarendon Press), George Orwell (Writers and their Work series), and co-editor, with Julia Kuehn, of A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s (Hong Kong University Press). He is also a founding co-editor of Critical Zone: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge.

First published by Finlay Publisher

Readers familiar with the life of George Orwell (b. Eric Blair, 1903) probably know that for over a year in the mid-1930s, he worked in a Hampstead bookshop — Booklovers’ Corner, at the junction of Pond Street and South End Green. The shop is long gone but a plaque commemorating the association now marks the spot. Writing about this experience, Orwell always portrayed it as a wretched one. In an essay, ‘Bookshop Memories’, published in 1936, he listed a veritable catalogue of miseries the job entailed, especially having to deal with the kind of customers the shop attracted. They were not, he wrote, as many people supposed, ‘charming old gentlemen browsing eternally among calf-bound folios’ — and really bookish people were a rarity.

Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all. ..In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.

That ‘exceptionally interesting stock’ is very differently depicted in his 1936 novel based on his bookselling experiences, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, filmed in 1997 with Richard E. Grant as the disgruntled young poet, Gordon Comstock, reduced to selling books, most of which he considers junk.

Eight hundred strong, the novels lined the room on three sides ceiling-high, row upon row of gaudy oblong backs, as though the walls had been built of many-coloured bricks laid upright. They were arranged alphabetically. Arlen, Burroughs, Deeping, Dell, Frankau, Galsworthy, Gibbs, Priestley, Sapper, Walpole. Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place. Pudding, suet pudding. Eight hundred slabs of pudding, walling him in — a vault of puddingstone.

People who knew Booklovers’ Corner regarded Orwell’s depiction of it as a caricature. But, as we know from books like Animal Farm, he was a brilliant satirist who exaggerated to make a point — in this case that writers were often forced into menial work in order to subsist. While he was writing Keep the Aspidistra Flying, his career had stalled and his literary future looked bleak. The book’s savage tone reflects his sense of frustration, but Comstock’s hatred of bookselling has been also ascribed to Orwell himself.

As if to confirm the point, in ‘Bookshop Memories’ he complained that the job had ruined his taste for books as sheer objects of pleasure.

There was a time when I really did love books — loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out of date gazetteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the ‘sixties. For casual reading — in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch — there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl’s Own Paper. ..Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can’t borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.

However, all this is Orwellian exaggeration, and even while he was still working at Booklovers’ Corner he told a girlfriend, ‘I wish I had £700, or even £500, and I could start a bookshop of my own.’ He didn’t open a bookshop, but he did continue collecting books.

Orwell was an avid reader and prolific reviewer, and thousands of books passed through his hands. He retained comparatively few, except those that influenced him most — those he called ‘books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude to life.’ Many of these cherished works inform his various works. So, like most readers who are book collectors, Orwell had two libraries — the vast incalculable one he kept stored in his mind and the more select one he kept on bookshelves at home.

Books he mentioned reading as a child included Beatrix Potter’s Pigling Bland (said to have had its own peculiar influence on Animal Farm), Lewis Carroll’s Alice books (humorous fantasy he thought the best way of debunking things), Ballantyne’s Coral Island (details of which he could recall some thirty years later), Dickens’s David Copperfield (one of his most brilliant essays was on Dickens), Gulliver’s Travels (Swift, like Dickens, was a guiding star for him), and H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (discovered in a friend’s library when he was fourteen). He loved comic books, especially the Gem and the Magnet, about which he famously wrote in his essay ‘Boys’ Weeklies,’ and American books for children — Little Women, Helen’s Babies, and Mark Twain’s stories of Mississippi life — which he celebrated in ‘Riding Down from Bangor.’ In his teens, he relished ghost stories (especially those of M. R. James) and the great detective stories of his age. His pantheon of fictional heroes encompassed Chesterton’s Father Brown, Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados, and R. Austin Freeman’s forensic detective, Dr. Thorndyke, as well as E. W. Hornung’s gentleman crook, Raffles. Above all he loved Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, many of which he claimed to know by heart. At his death he still possessed a much-thumbed 1925 edition of The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

Books read as a boy continued to influence him. Mark Twain’s Roughing It, W. H. Davies’s Autobiography of a Super Tramp, and Jack London’s People of the Abyss — read while a schoolboy at Eton — informed his very first book (Down and Out in Paris and London, published by Gollancz in 1933), a report based on his experiences of dishwashing in Paris restaurants and tramping in England.

Orwell’s admirers are often surprised to learn how highly he regarded the writing of Somerset Maugham — ‘The Vice Consul’ (from On a Chinese Screen, 1922), clearly inspired his essay ‘A Hanging’, and Ashenden (1928) was one of the models he took (along with Swift’s A Modest Proposal) in working to perfect his own ‘windowpane’ style of prose. In 1940 he wrote, ‘I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.’

Until his mid-thirties, Orwell was something of a gypsy. After a childhood in Henley-on-Thames and early adult years spent in Southwold, there were (after absences in Burma and Paris), various lodgings in and around London until 1936, when he married and settled in an old cottage in Wallington in Hertfordshire. So, he was late in beginning to build a settled library, as others with his breadth and depth of reading (he was a classics scholar) might have done much earlier. There were also financial limits to his book-buying, most of his pre-war adult life having been spent in comparative poverty. However, he haunted secondhand shops and sometimes the review copies did accumulate. Lettice Cooper, the novelist, who visited the Wallington cottage, remembered books all over the place, including piles on the stairs — ‘booby-traps for the unwary.’

His experiences in the Spanish Civil War produced Orwell’s greatest nonfiction work, Homage to Catalonia, inspired by Great War memoirs such as Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Aldington’s All Men Are Enemies (the best of them all, he thought), and Max Plowman’s A Subaltern on the Somme. His disillusionment with communism in Spain eventually spawned his two last great novels.

In wartime London, Orwell worked first at the BBC, then as literary editor of the left-wing review Tribune. In 1944, just after he had moved his library from Wallington, his flat in Kilburn was demolished by a doodlebug. His friend Inez Holden remembered him scrabbling among the bomb-rubble to salvage his books and trundling them in a wheelbarrow back to the Tribune office in the Strand during his lunch breaks — a strenuous task for a man now fatally stricken with tuberculosis; but parted from his books he felt acutely deprived.

Not long after Animal Farm appeared in 1946, and money troubles were finally behind him, he estimated his library at around nine hundred books, of which a dozen were borrowed. They had, he calculated, cost him £165.15S over the previous fifteen years. Some, however, dated from his childhood, some were old favourites preserved in blue bindings. A number of them — mainly the works of the Elizabethans and Romantics — were brought to their marriage by his first wife, Eileen, an Oxford graduate and poet, and one-time student of Tolkien.

Until 1949, Orwell laboured to produce his final masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four: Among the books which helped define that novel’s bleak vision were Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Eugene Lyons’s Assignment in Utopia, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and Zamyatin’s We. Of these, only the Koestler survived among his final collection.

The 523 books remaining at his death are listed in Peter Davison’s twenty-volume Complete Works of George Orwell. They include a 1921 edition of Butler’s Notebooks (which he had had in Burma as a young policeman in the early 1920s), a full set of Conrad, a 1901 popular edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Dickens’s works in fifteen volumes from various publishers, sixteen T. S. Eliot first editions (none earlier than 1925), an 1853 edition of Fielding’s works, a 1921 edition of Anatole France’s Les contes de Jacques Tournebroche, Hardy’s The Dynasts (rebound in dark blue), the Petronius Satyricon, a complete Thackeray in ten volumes, a collection of Trollopes (the Anglican Church held a strange fascination for him), Tolstoy’s War and Peace (in three volumes), Twain’s Innocents Abroad (a 1871 edition), and several novels of George Gissing (a writer he greatly admired). Apart from the Eliots, there were first editions of Graham Greene’s England Made Me and The Heart of the Matter, and of Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags.

One set of books he was extremely proud to possess was Miscellanies in Prose and Poetry, a first collected edition of Swift, published somewhere between 1738 and 1744 (probably that printed by George Faulkner from 1735 onwards), bought for five shillings at a farmhouse auction. In 1935, he had begun collecting political and religious pamphlets. Eight years later, with Reginald Reynolds, he edited a collection of these (British Pamphleteers, Volume I, published by Allan Wingate in 1943), to which he wrote a brilliant introduction lamenting the deterioration of pamphleteering in an age of party political rhetoric. It reflects an intense sympathy for the English dissident tradition and the sort of awkward, critical cast of mind that finally brings the wretched Winston Smith to his doom at the hands of Big Brother. Orwell’s pamphlets, 353 in all, now reside at the British Library.

Books in his collection that would now command a decent price include first UK editions of James Joyce’s Haveth Childers Everywhere (1931) and Two Tales of Shem and Shaun (1932), and a 1925 Paris edition of Ulysses in a blue binding. For a time he had been quite inspired by Joyce’s great book (as an awkward pastiche of the Nighttown chapter in A Clergyman’s Daughter reveals), but, with the emergence of Finnegans Wake, his interest, along with that of many others, waned. In the thirties he had possessed first editions of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Black Spring (1936), both banned in England at the time, but in January 1940, after a letter to the publisher (Jack Kahane of the Obelisk Press in Paris) was intercepted, his Wallington cottage was raided and Henry Miller was taken into custody. ‘The police were only carrying out orders and were very nice about it,’ he told Victor Gollancz, ‘and even the public prosecutor wrote and said that he understood that as a writer I might have certain books, e.g., Lady Chatterley’s Lover; but it appears that Miller’s books have not been in print long enough to have become respectable.’

None of the above firsts appears to have been signed; inscribed editions did not interest him. Working at Booklovers’ Corner he had attended country house auctions to acquire books for the shop, but except in rare instances signed copies and autographs left him cold:

We bought recently a lot of books with the authors’ signatures in, and some of them containing autograph letters as well, but they were all sold almost at once. One that pleased me was inscribed ‘From Beverley Nicholls, in all humility.’ There is a subtle humour in that. I often see autographed letters etc. advertised among the lots at book-auctions. I remember distinctly that in one case a letter from Sheila Kaye-Smith was priced higher than one from Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (the Queen Anne one). You often see autographs of Napoleon advertised, but they are usually pretty expensive, and of course they are not letters, only documents signed by him. Towards the end of his life he never seems to have written anything except his signature with his own hand, and apparently his spelling was appalling.

Even so, Orwell’s posthumous library did include a few signed copies, three, including the four-volume Left Hand, Right Hand (1945-49), by Osbert Sitwell, an old acquaintance, and two inscribed by another friend, Stephen Spender — Spiritual Exercises (privately printed in 1943) and Trial of a Judge (1938). However, while their condition is unknown, the most valuable books in the whole collection were probably the personal copies of his own works, though strangely, at the end, some volumes were missing — Keep the Aspidistra Flying; The Road to Wigan Pier; Coming Up for Air and Animal Farm. The complete collection was distributed among three people, his second wife, Sonia, his sister Avril, and Sir Richard Rees — all of whom are long dead, though no doubt the books have survived their past owners.

At least one book he left achieved value by association with him. A copy of Thomas Gray’s Poems (1920 edition), presented to him by the headmaster of Eton, Cyril Alington, on his leaving the College in 1921, and inscribed ‘Hunc librum Erico A. Blair ab Etona discedenti dono dedit Cyrillus Alington Magister Informator. Etonae A.D. MCMXX1,’ offered for sale by George S. MacManus in Philadelphia in 1983, fetched $1,750. In sharp contrast, in 1953 Orwell’s widow, Sonia, sold the only surviving Orwell manuscript — that of Nineteen Eighty-Four — at a charity auction for £50. Today, of course, it would command many thousands.

Some books were absent from the final list. That missing copy of Animal Farm was probably the presentation copy, rebound in dark blue, left to his adopted son Richard. Also absent were those books left at his bedside when he died at University College in January of 1950. He had also inherited a miniature library which spoke of a faded aristocratic past (the Earl of Westmorland was distantly related) and to which Orwell was particularly attached. He described it in his will as a ‘small collection of leather-covered books which are kept in a wooden travelling case and were originally the property of my great-uncle Horatio Blair.’ That case and set of books, now owned by Orwell’s niece, comprises some 152 volumes small enough (5×3 inches) to fit into the wooden case (a hinged library, three shelves high, 18 x 18 inches) with which Captain Blair put to sea in the mid-nineteenth century. These comprise an 1826 two-volume edition of Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler (printed by F. J. Rivington of London), thirty volumes of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle (1778), and 120 copies of Bell’s edition of Poems of Great Britain: From Chaucer to Churchill (c. 1780). Apart from its antique value, the Orwell association must lend this collection a considerable rarity.

Orwell was not a book collector in any specialist sense. His library represents the map of a great mind. There were favourite books he read and reread, those he read in passing, and those ‘collected’ within himself. Each of them added to what he called his ‘mental topography.’ At his death, his library contained probably the books he valued most, those that over the years had escaped his occasional culls or acts of generosity.

After working in Australia and the Middle East, Gordon Bowker studied at Nottingham and London Universities before teaching at Goldsmith’s College and writing drama-documentaries for radio and television. He has contributed to The London Magazine, Independent, Sunday Times, Times Literary Supplement, and New York Times. He has written film-location reports for The Observer (including Huston’s Under the Volcano and Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor) and dispatches from Berlin and Warsaw for the Illustrated London News. His books include Malcolm Lowry Remembered (1985); Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry (1994, New York Times Notable Book of the Year); and Through the Dark Labyrinth: A Biography of Lawrence Durrell (1996). His George Orwell appeared in 2003, Orwell’s centenary year. This article originally appeared in Book and Magazine Collector (under the title ‘George Orwell: Book Collector’) and was reprinted in the later version by the New England Review. It is reproduced here by kind permission of the author.

The Orwell Foundation is delighted to make available a selection of essays, articles, sketches, reviews and scripts written by Orwell.

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Sketches For Burmese Days

• 1. John Flory – My Epitaph
• 2. Extract, Preliminary to Autobiography
• 3. Extract, the Autobiography of John Flory
• 4. An Incident in Rangoon
• 5. Extract, A Rebuke to the Author, John Flory

Essays and articles

• A Day in the Life of a Tramp (Le Progrès Civique, 1929)
• A Hanging (The Adelphi, 1931)
• A Nice Cup of Tea (Evening Standard, 1946)
• Antisemitism in Britain (Contemporary Jewish Record, 1945)
• Arthur Koestler (written 1944)
• British Cookery (unpublished, 1946)
• Can Socialists be Happy? (as John Freeman, Tribune, 1943)
• Common Lodging Houses (New Statesman, 3 September 1932)
• Confessions of a Book Reviewer (Tribune, 1946)
• “For what am I fighting?” (New Statesman, 4 January 1941)
• Freedom and Happiness – Review of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (Tribune, 1946)
• Freedom of the Park (Tribune, 1945)
• Future of a Ruined Germany (The Observer, 1945)
• Good Bad Books (Tribune, 1945)
• In Defence of English Cooking (Evening Standard, 1945)
• In Front of Your Nose (Tribune, 1946)
• Just Junk – But Who Could Resist It? (Evening Standard, 1946)
• My Country Right or Left (Folios of New Writing, 1940)
• Nonsense Poetry (Tribune, 1945)
• Notes on Nationalism (Polemic, October 1945)
• Pleasure Spots (Tribune, January 1946)
• Poetry and the microphone (The New Saxon Pamphlet, 1945)
• Politics and the English Language (Horizon, 1946)
• Politics vs. Literature: An examination of Gulliver’s Travels (Polemic, 1946)
• Reflections on Gandhi (Partisan Review, 1949)
• Rudyard Kipling (Horizon, 1942)
• Second Thoughts on James Burnham (Polemic, 1946)
• Shooting an Elephant (New Writing, 1936)
• Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (Tribune, 1946)
• Spilling the Spanish Beans (New English Weekly, 29 July and 2 September 1937)
• The Art of Donald McGill (Horizon, 1941)
• The Moon Under Water (Evening Standard, 1946)
• The Prevention of Literature (Polemic, 1946)
• The Proletarian Writer (BBC Home Service and The Listener, 1940)
• The Spike (Adelphi, 1931)
• The Sporting Spirit (Tribune, 1945)
• Why I Write (Gangrel, 1946)
• You and the Atom Bomb (Tribune, 1945)

Reviews by Orwell

• Anonymous Review of Burmese Interlude by C. V. Warren (The Listener, 1938)
• Anonymous Review of Trials in Burma by Maurice Collis (The Listener, 1938)
• Review of The Pub and the People by Mass-Observation (The Listener, 1943)

Letters and other material

• BBC Archive: George Orwell
• Free will (a one act drama, written 1920)
• George Orwell to Steven Runciman (August 1920)
• George Orwell to Victor Gollancz (9 May 1937)
• George Orwell to Frederic Warburg (22 October 1948, Letters of Note)
• ‘Three parties that mattered’: extract from Homage to Catalonia (1938)
• Voice – a magazine programme, episode 6 (BBC Indian Service, 1942)
• Your Questions Answered: Wigan Pier (BBC Overseas Service)
• The Freedom of the Press: proposed preface to Animal Farm (1945, first published 1972)
• Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm (March 1947)

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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, After the War: The Novel and England since 1945 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.

Although George Orwell (Eric Blair) was born in India and grew up in Henley-on-Thames, he was a Londoner by adoption[1]. He lived and worked in various places around the city, not all of them marked with commemoration plaques. It was in London in the early 1930s that he was down-and-out, and in London in the late 40s that he found a fame and fortune he would never live fully to enjoy. London features in much of his writing, and one can still recreate important stretches of his life by visiting parts of the city where, at various times, he tried to scratch a living as schoolteacher, bookseller, novelist and reviewer.

View Orwell’s London in a larger map

By 1917, young Blair was a scholarship boy at Eton. At about that time, his mother moved from Henley to London to do war-work for the Ministry of Pensions, renting a pied-à-terre at 23 Cromwell Crescent, Earl’s Court, a house sadly no longer there. Later, in one of his ‘London Letters’ for the Partisan Review, he wrote disdainfully of ‘The foul… endless… “London fogs” of my childhood’, and, in The Road to Wigan Pier, about ‘the dreary wastes of Kensington and Earl’s Court’, home of the slowly expiring upper middle-classes.
View Orwell’s London in a larger map

But not everything about Georgian London was distasteful to him. His Bohemian Aunt Nellie Limouzin lived not far away, in a top-floor flat at 195, Ladbroke Grove where she frequently entertained her Suffragette and literary friends. There he met such figures as G.K. Chesterton and E. Nesbit, the children’s writer and composer of socialist hymns, and the communist vicar, Conrad Noel, who famously ran the red flag up the tower of his parish church at Thaxted. It was through Nellie (a one-time vaudevillian) that he first discovered the London music halls (the world of the vulgar seaside postcard brought to life, as he saw it), and came to relish the bawdy humour of Marie Lloyd, George Robey, Little Tich and later Max Miller.

During the Second World War, he reviewed a Miller performance at the Holborn Empire for Time and Tide. ‘Max Miller, who looks more like a Middlesex Street hawker than ever when he is wearing a tail coat and a shiny top hat,’ he wrote, ‘is one of a long line of English comedians who have specialized in the Sancho Panza side of life, in real lowness. To do this probably needs more talent than to express nobility.’ However, he rated Little Tich ‘the real master’ of the low comedic art, concluding that ‘It would seem that you cannot be funny without being vulgar.’

The musical theatre obviously appealed to the young Etonian. Seeing the long-running musical Chu Chin Chow at His Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket, as a boy, gave him a vision of the mysterious East (somewhat different from that of Kipling), which may have coloured his expectations of Burma when he went there as a nineteen year-old. The charm of the show, he recalled, ‘lay in the fantastic unreality of the whole thing, and the droves of women, practically naked and painted to an agreeable walnut-juice tint. It was a never-never land, the “gorgeous East”, where, as is well-known, everyone has fifty wives and spends his time lying on a divan, eating pomegranates.’ And he long remembered seeing Nigel Playfair’s acclaimed productions of The Beggar’s Opera and The Blue Lagoon in 1920 at the Lyric Hammersmith.

By 1918, the Blairs had moved to a flat in Mall Chambers on Kensington Mall at Notting Hill Gate. They were not particularly well-off (his father was a retired Indian Civil Servant), and Mall Chambers was a block of low-rental flats provided mainly for artisans. The area probably suited him well because of its many literary associations — Wyndham Lewis, Hilaire Belloc and Ford Madox Ford lived nearby and William Cobbett had set off on his rural rides from Notting Hill.

After Eton, Blair joined the Indian Police Service in Burma, but resigned after five years, disgusted with what policing the Empire had required of him. (Famously, he was once witness to a hanging.) His first novel, Burmese Days, and the confessional passages in The Road to Wigan Pier are good guides to his state of mind at that time. He was determined to seek redemption by sinking into the lower depths. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, his third novel, he writes of his alter ego, Gordon Comstock:

He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself — to sink…It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being underground. He liked to think about the lost people, the under-ground people, tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost-kingdom, below ambition.

Gordon finds that purgatorial underground in the slums of old Lambeth, but initially the twenty-four year-old Eric Blair sought it elsewhere.

In late 1927, his friend Ruth Pitter, the poet, found him an unheated attic at 22 Portobello Road, a short walk from his old home at Notting Hill Gate. The room was so cold that he had to warm his hands over a candle-flame before he could start writing in the morning. From this icy cell he set out in old clothes to mingle with the tramps and down-and-outs who slept along the Embankment, in common lodging-houses and ‘spikes’, the casual wards of workhouses. Most of these spikes and lodging-houses (or ‘kips’) have long gone, though a few of the old workhouse buildings survive, often as NHS hospitals. It was from a kip in Lambeth that he tramped down to Kent to go hop-picking among the East Enders and gypsy families who migrated there every year for a working holiday. This experience is recaptured in his very first article for the New Statesman in October 1931, and also lies at the heart of his second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter.

After almost two years in Paris, where poverty forced him into working as a menial plongeur in the kitchens of a luxury hotel, he returned home. His family were now living in Southwold on the Suffolk coast, but he often tramped to London to spend time with his friends the Fierzes, who lived in Oakwood Road, Golders Green. Mabel Fierz, a vivacious and opinionated middle-aged woman, considered herself something of a talent-spotter, and it was she who took the manuscript of what was then called Days in Paris and London to the literary agent who sold it to Victor Gollancz. The re-entitled Down and Out in Paris and London, for which he first took the pseudonym ‘George Orwell’, appeared in 1933.

A year earlier, in order to get a taste of prison and to bring himself closer to the tramps and small-time villains with whom he mingled, Orwell decided to get himself arrested. He thought of starting a bonfire in Trafalgar Square — where occasionally he slept out under newspapers with the other vagrants — but his friend, Jack Common, told him that if he wanted a decent stretch inside he should go in for theft. Finally, he went down to the Mile End Road, drank five pints followed by a quarter bottle of whisky and ended up in an East End police cell. Sadly for Orwell, however, after just one night behind bars, the magistrate dismissed him with a small fine. This experience produced a short essay, ‘Clink’, published for the first time in The Complete Works of George Orwell (2000), and also found its way into Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

Other experiences of underground London further informed his novels. Rayner Heppenstall, the novelist and broadcaster, remembered how difficult it was to pry Orwell loose from the clutches of an eager tart in a Hampstead pub, and earlier he had been thrown out of lodgings in Paddington for entertaining ladies of the night in his room. But this was all grist to his fiction-mill. In A Clergyman’s Daughter, he describes how Dorothy finds herself unexpectedly in a house of ill-fame, and in Keep the Aspidistra Flying how Gordon is whisked off to a brothel by a Piccadilly prostitute. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston Smith recalls a loveless encounter with an aging hooker (‘She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of preliminary, in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt.’) Each of these descriptions smacks of first-hand experience.

In 1934, like certain other contemporaries — Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, for example — Orwell did a stint as a schoolteacher, first in Hayes (The Hawthorns) then at Uxbridge (Frays College), where he lamented the encroachment of hideous suburbs across the idyllic country landscape of southern England. Even so, it was amid this urban desolation that first he completed Burmese Days, then caught pneumonia and came close to death. The following year, he was back in the city, working at a Hampstead bookshop, Booklovers’ Corner, at the corner of South End Green and Pond Street, just below the Royal Free Hospital. The bookshop has gone, but Orwell’s time there is commemorated with a plaque[2]. The shop and his life as a bookseller were described in his 1936 essay, ‘Bookshop Memories’, later included in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1968), and feature in somewhat exaggerated form in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

For a while he lived at 77, Parliament Hill, overlooking Hampstead Heath, and there at a party he met his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, an Oxford English graduate who had been taught by J.R.R. Tolkien. She was then doing an MA in psychology at University College and living with her widowed mother in Greenwich. Finding the rent too high, Orwell moved into a flat with his young friends, Heppenstall and the Irish poet and critic, Michael Sayers, at 50 Lawford Road, Kentish Town, where Sayers made a strange discovery about their eccentric housemate. One day, in the first-floor living-room, he found the man he called ‘Eric Orwell’ copying passages from Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal and Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, trying, he said, to perfect a style which excluded adjectives. It was a style he demonstrated soon afterwards in his celebrated essay, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ — probably the first example of the windowpane-like prose for which he is now celebrated.

For the next four years, after marrying Eileen in 1936, he lived in the Hertfordshire village of Wallington, with absences to investigate unemployment in the North, fight in the Spanish Civil War, and finally, after an attack of TB, convalesce in Morocco. Before leaving for Spain and after his return, the couple stayed at 24 Croom’s Hill, Greenwich, the home of Eileen’s surgeon brother Laurence. It was there in October 1939, that Orwell had a grim but prophetic vision of the looming war, as he told Rayner Heppenstall — ‘I was down at Greenwich the other day and looking at the river I thought what wonders a few bombs would work among the shipping.’ He was also staying with Laurence in Greenwich on the day war broke out, 3 September 1939, and from there that in August 1940 he watched the first real raid of the London blitz and saw the East India docks going up in flames.

Occasionally during those immediate pre-war years, he travelled into the city to visit his publishers, whose offices stood just off the Strand — Victor Gollancz, to the north, at 14 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, and Secker and Warburg to the south, at 22 Essex Street, down towards the Thames. The Strand is where George Bowling, hero of Coming Up For Air, has the Proustian moment — a newspaper headline and the recalled smell of sainfoin chaff evoking the Golden Age of his Thameside childhood — which sends him off in search of lost time. Pedestrians swarming along the Strand also provided him with another eve-of-war vision — a recurrent one for Orwell — of England sleeping even as bombs and a war of annihilation threaten:

The usual crowd that you can hardly fight your way through was streaming up the pavement, all of them with that insane fixed expression on their faces that people have in London streets, and there was the usual jam of traffic with the great red buses nosing their way between the cars and the engines roaring and horns tooting. Enough noise to waken the dead, but not to waken this lot, I thought. I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleep walkers…And this kind of prophetic feeling that keeps coming over me nowadays, the feeling that war’s just round the corner and that war’s the end of all things… We’re all on the burning deck and nobody knows it except me. I looked at the dumb bell faces streaming past. Like turkeys in November, I thought. Not a notion of what’s coming to them. It was as if I’d got X rays in my eyes and could see the skeletons walking.

Mostly, the ungainly, ascetic Orwell avoided London literary circles and what he called ‘the slimy careerism’ of certain writers and critics, but on at least one occasion in the 30s, at a time when left-wing politics were becoming fashionable, he attended a party thrown by his friend Cyril Connolly at his flat in the King’s Road, Chelsea (at number 312) attended by a number of fashionable women, and made an unexpected impression.

He came along, looking gaunt and shaggy, shabby, aloof [recalled Connolly], and he had this extraordinary magical effect on these women. They all wanted to meet him and started talking to him, and their fur coats shook with pleasure. They were totally unprepared for anyone like that and they responded to something — this sort of John the Baptist figure coming in from the wilderness — and suddenly the women feel it doesn’t matter what his political views are, he’s a wonderful man. And that was rather the effect he had everywhere, I think.

For a couple of years after the outbreak of war, he reviewed both plays and films for Time & Tide, for some months commuting from his cottage in Hertfordshire for the purpose. Eileen found employment first at the Censorship Office in Whitehall and later for the Ministry of Food in Portman Square; Eric (unfit to fight) went to work as a radio producer with the BBC’s India Service, for which he worked from August 1941 until November 1943 from make-shift offices in the old Peter Robinson store at 200, Oxford Street (known familiarly as the ZOO). To be near their work they moved back into London, living first in a tiny flat at Dorset Chambers in Chagford Street, close to Regent’s Park (where he drilled with his Home Guard platoon), then at the more spacious Langford Court in Langford Place off Abbey Road (said to be the model for Victory Mansions in Nineteen Eighty-Four), and finally at 10 Mortimer Crescent, in Kilburn, which was wrecked by a flying bomb in June 1944. They then found a large top-floor flat at 27 Canonbury Square, Islington, while Orwell worked as Literary Editor for the left-wing review, Tribune (at 222, the Strand). There, with some help from Eileen, he completed Animal Farm and began sketching out Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Islington flat was reached by a back-breaking climb up a brick staircase at the rear of the building, which was hard on Orwell’s weak lungs. But he ran a cosy household, the climax of each day being the 5 o’clock ritual of high-tea, always with the same appetizing menu. In a fond memoir, ‘Don Quixote on a Bicycle’, first published in the London Magazine, Paul Potts, the rangy Irish-Canadian poet Catholic-educated libertarian, notorious sponger and haunter of London’s Bohemia, recalled the Pickwickian scene:

Nothing could be more pleasant than the sight of his living-room in Canonbury Square early on a winter’s evening at high tea-time. A huge fire, the table crowded with marvellous things, Gentleman’s Relish and various jams, kippers, crumpets and toast. And always the Gentleman’s Relish, with its peculiar unique flat jar and the Latin inscription on the label. Next to it usually stood the Cooper’s Oxford marmalade pot. He thought in terms of vintage tea and had the same attitude to bubble and squeak as a Frenchman has to Camembert. I’ll swear he valued tea and roast beef above the OM and the Nobel Prize. Then there was the conversation and the company, his wife, some members of his family or hers, a refugee radical or an English writer. There was something very innocent and terribly simple about him. He wasn’t a very good judge of character. He was of roast beef, however. He loved being a host, as only civilized men can, who have been very poor. There was nothing bohemian about him at all. However poor he had been it did not make him precarious. But he tolerated in others faults he did not possess himself.

One of his best and most lyrical short Tribune pieces, ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’, celebrated the end of the cruel winter of 1946 and the signs of a belated spring to be glimpsed in even the gloomiest of London streets and round and about the Bank of England. While some wartime winters had appeared to be permanent, he wrote, spring, like the common toad, always stirred eventually. Despite the grimness of the bombed-out city, Orwell was ever alert to the movement of the seasons and never as enshrouded in gloom as he is sometimes depicted.

After Eileen died unexpectedly during an operation in early 1945, he kept on the Islington flat but began spending more time on the Hebridean island of Jura with his young adopted son, Richard. There, in 1948, as his health continued to deteriorate and he was often too exhausted even to get out of bed, he finally completed Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The setting of that novel — a society terrorized by the all-seeing Big Brother whose Thought Police torture and brainwash their victims in Room 101 at the Ministry of Love — is really the bombed-out London Orwell remembered from his war years there. Winston Smith, the book’s persecuted hero, works at rewriting history along Party lines at the Ministry of Truth, based partly on London University’s Senate House in Malet Street, wartime headquarters of the Ministry of Information (where Orwell worked occasionally in 1941), and partly on Broadcasting House and 200 Oxford Street. The infamous Room 101 itself was a committee room at 55 Portland Place. On a day Orwell’s department is known to have had a meeting there he succumbed to a violent attack of bronchitis, which could explain why he associated that room with torture.

In the novel, Trafalgar Square becomes Victory Square and Nelson’s Column stands as a monument to Big Brother. The rundown proletarian district where Winston and Julia find a love-nest over Mr Charrington’s antique shop is the area between King’s Cross and Islington through which Orwell usually walked home while working at Tribune. Reading the book, anyone familiar with the capital will recognize the London where Winston is misguided enough to think that he can outwit Big Brother and remain a freethinking individual.

As most people know, finally, under the weighty effort of completing this depressing novel, Orwell’s health collapsed completely, and he spent several months in early 1949 trying unsuccessfully to recover at a Gloucestershire sanatorium. However, he did return one final time to London.

On 3 September 1949 he was transferred to University College Hospital where first he got married to the youthful Sonia Brownell, assistant editor of the literary magazine Horizon, the model for Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Julia — the girl from the Fiction Department — and then, on 21 January 1950, died of a haemorrhage of the lungs brought on by TB. His last months were spent not only dying wretchedly but also observing in his then gloomy way how the equalities of austere wartime London were being eroded as advertisements for servants reappeared in The Times and Rolls Royces once again began to be seen on the streets.

He had two funerals, one for George Orwell, the now famous author, and the other for Eric Blair, the obscure presence behind the name. The first, Orwell’s funeral, attended by his many friends, was held at Christ Church, Albany Street, near Regent’s Park, now an Eastern Orthodox Cathedral whose patron saint, curiously enough, is St George. Blair’s funeral, attended by his widow and a solicitor, was held in Sutton Courtenay in Oxfordshire where he lies buried between the First World War Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and a family of local gypsies — taking in the compass-range of his whole being: the nineteenth century liberal on the one hand and the travellers and hop-pickers on the other.

One interesting feature of the London districts in which Orwell lived, is that all of them figure in the novels of his favourite author, Dickens. The Dickensian interest is also to be seen in some of the London characters in Orwell’s own work — Bozo the screever and Ginger the thief, in Down and Out in Paris and London; the down-and-out Mrs McElligot and the demonic Mr Tallboys in A Clergyman’s Daughter, kipping among the tramps in Trafalgar Square [3]; Gordon Comstock, the dropped-out poet, slumming through Lambeth in Keep the Aspidistra Flying; Mr Charrington the antique-shop owner in Nineteen Eighty-Four. None of these characters would be out of place in a Dickens novel, and one might still come across them in the back-streets and dingier corners of the capital.

Orwell’s preferred Soho pub was the Wheatsheaf in Rathbone Place; his favourite restaurants were the long-gone Barcelona Café in Beak Street, the still-thriving Elysee in Percy Street and Bertorelli’s in Charlotte Street. It was at Bertorelli’s in 1935 that he entertained Sir Richard Rees and three others to the dinner at which he blew his £50 advance for the US edition of Burmese Days, and after which, in drunken high spirits, he knocked off a policeman’s helmet, leaving Rees to smooth things over and escort him home. The incident duly found its way into Keep the Aspidistra Flying, re-enacted with much panache by Richard E. Grant, with Julian Wadham, and Helena Bonham-Carter in attendance, in Robert Bierman’s 1997 film of the novel.

The Moon Under Water pub described so enthusiastically by Orwell in an Evening Standard article of February 1946, was imaginary, and the five pubs with that name in today’s London phonebook have clearly borrowed it from Orwell’s fantasy.

Orwell claimed to hate London, as did Eileen, but in many ways, along with Dickens, George Gissing, Patrick Hamilton and Peter Ackroyd, he is one of those novelists who has contributed most to the tradition of the London novel. He had a feeling, too, for the people who lived there. During the war he wrote movingly about the Londoners sheltering from air-raids in the city’s crypts and underground stations, praised London theatre audiences who remained to watch the show even while the bombs were falling, and told his friend Julian Symons, ‘I hate London. I really would like to get out of it, but of course you can’t leave while people are being bombed to bits all around you.’

What he loved about London were the art galleries — inexpensive places to take girls he fancied — and the parks — convenient spaces for casual seductions. He enjoyed the Regent’s Park zoo and had a great affection for the city’s junk-shops — treasure-houses of the past, as Winston Smith discovers in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But against what he might have regarded as the ‘romantic’ aspect of the city, he was ever conscious of its inhuman aspect. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he wrote that ‘London is a sort of whirlpool which draws derelict people towards it, and it is so vast that life there is solitary and anonymous. Until you break the law nobody will take any notice of you, and you can go to pieces as you could not possibly do in a place where you had neighbours who knew you.’ That was his picture of the city in the mid-1930s, but, for those living on its margins, the grim London Orwell described there so vividly is no doubt still a cruel reality.

© Gordon Bowker 2008

The Orwell Prize is very grateful to Gordon Bowker for permission to publish this piece online. An earlier version of this article appeared in Planet in June 2006.

Notes

Anorexia. Harsh, taboo, sends a shiver down your spine. Parents shudder and
silently pride themselves on their teenager’s health, whilst the teenager whispers
with their friends about the suspiciously skinny sick girl. She works head-down
every lesson, though is never really there – she’s locked inside her mind, you see, in
a battle for her mind itself.

At the word anorexia, you likely thought of a Cassie Ainsworth dreamer – slim,
teenage girl, picture perfect family hiding self-absorbed parents. True, the major
demographic of anorexics are female, specifically teenagers, but this gets conflated
into the idea that only teenage girls can be anorexic – it could just as easily afflict
the 26 year old gym bro, or your local librarian. Many could argue that the 2000s
starving skinny aesthetic and ‘thin-spo’ Tumblr enforced this belief, but then the
question must be asked ‘why do we still not see the truth?’. The answer is simple –
fear. Adults tiptoe around the word, flag it up on school systems, give assemblies on
healthy eating with pictures of sallow, malnourished girls in the background. The
gymnasts and dancers face anorexic accusations, whilst the bullies hurl them at
their too-skinny peers. But, all the while, not one person truly understands the
parasite they speak of – if you do, it’s too late.

To understand the truth of anorexia, you have to have survived the deadliest mental
illness. No amount of sobbing and gesticulating, shouting and pleading can convey
its horror to a parent, a friend, a therapist. There’s no way to relate the feeling of
thousands of cockroaches entering your stomach at the sight of your favourite food,
of the unsuppressable swell of disgust and guilt after dinner. You can describe a
surrealist world – a bone-cold world stripped of flavour and colour, body shape
fluctuating every minute, a salty taste left mingling in the air. All you’ll get are
wide-eyed stares and hushed arguments, the threat of hospital floating towards you.
But the truly terrifying part is not the blackness encroaching upon the corners of
your vision, nor the constant muffling cloud lying over your brain – the true terror
is the comfort you feel in that place, walking the liminality between life and death.

Like any good parasite, anorexia hides itself. In the dark crevices of your mind it
shelters, feeding on your suffering, a sadistic foe that can never quite be
vanquished. It’s more than any old disease – it ekes out treasured moments of
happiness, letting you bask in its glory as it steals more of your being. Once it has
wormed its way into your mind, fuelled by offhand comments and dwindling
dopamine, it constructs a mirror – you and it vs the world. As your concerned
mother sidles towards you, inconspicuous Mars bar outstretched, the world
.flips
Now, your mother walks towards you with a suspicious glint in her eye, the
chocolate wrapper crinkling aggressively in his hand. You lean back behind the
mirror, into the comfort of your roommate, by now as familiar as the Friday family
movie-nights you used to love. Soon the comfort turns into oblivion – unending cold
and exhaustion go unnoticed in the haze of your dreams, pushing through despair
and hopelessness, until finally… you break.

It’s different for everyone – pleas from family, the promise of a better future, maybe
a weekend hiatus to A&E. For some, it’s the threat of life continuing past tomorrow,
another failed day. For another 20%, they don’t get off at the breaking point – they
plunge so deep that resuscitation efforts fail, mournful corpses drifting off along a
boulevard of broken dreams. But for those valiant prisoners, who still have that
final drop of strength, they strike against the mirror so hard as to cleave off the
tiniest chink, a sole ray of hope peaking through. What follows is the hardest
journey of their life – the road to recovery.

The indignity begins immediately. Tests, investigations, tell-tale trail of red dots
from the hourly blood monitoring. One of the most dangerous secrets of anorexia is
refeeding syndrome, a life-threatening complication of nourishment after an
extended or severe period of malnutrition. The body must slow down its metabolism
to conserve energy during undernutrition, even turning to its own fat and muscle
for fuel (this being the culprit of the permanent brain fog). However, once food
returns, the body jumps in delight and returns to its everyday carbohydrate
metabolism – in its delight, it overlooks the caches of micronutrients stolen by
anorexia. When the long-awaited bounty is finally eaten, your cells demand
electrolytes to metabolise the food, causing a severe shift in body chemistry. This
can result in nausea, swallowing problems and muscle weakness, to the more severe
kidney dysfunction, seizures, coma and cardiac arrest. What a lovely welcome back
to the land of the living!

Unfortunately for our escapee, they’ve still got a long slog through parole before the
impossible can be reached – freedom. Bodies lose muscle mass before fat in weight
loss (unless tightly controlled), and severe weight loss breaks down the big guns.
For many, heart muscles are greatly weakened, resulting in low heart rate and
arrhythmias – a little-known result of these is an ominous purple flush to feet when
stationary, and blue-tinged fingers at most times. To rectify this, and the constant
fatigue, gastroparesis etc., they must do that which scares them most – gain weight.
As a cherry on top, it must be fat, as the body prioritises protecting vital organs
above juvenile concerns like self-esteem. This often results in a much-needed
central adipose body type (displayed by pot-belly beer drinkers), sending the sufferer
into a spiral of regret. To push through requires sheer willpower, and it is VITAL to
do so. After a period of time, the body will redistribute weight more evenly,
confident that danger has passed – fighting the weight only prolongs your suffering
and risk of osteoporosis (SERIOUSLY UNWANTED BONE CONDITION).

But recovery is not simply gaining weight – it’s slamming against the mirror with
the force of tear-drenched nights and missed opportunities, silent screams in the
changing rooms.
It’s breaking the surface of the muffled sea into a world of chaos and colour, sound
and beauty.
It’s the ebb and flow of the darkness, never quite disappearing but overwhelmed by
possibility and experience, laughter and arguments, of a life almost extinguished.
It’s truly you.

Sources:
● Cleveland Clinic – Refeeding Syndrome
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/23228-refeeding-syndrome
● Within Health – Examining the anorexia death rate
https://withinhealth.com/learn/articles/examining-the-anorexia-death-rate
● National Library of Medicine – Chronic Starvation Secondary to Anorexia
Nervosa is Associated with an Adaptive Suppression of Resting Energy
Expenditure https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3942230/
● American Heart Association – How eating disorders can damage the heart
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2024/02/26/how-eating-disorders-can-damage
-the-heart
● PubMed Central – Adipose tissue distribution after weight restoration and
weight maintenance in women with anorexia nervosa
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2762154/
● Royal Osteoporosis Society – Anorexia and Osteoporosis
https://theros.org.uk/information-and-support/osteoporosis/causes/anorexia/

This is an extract from The Wall Dancers by Yi-Ling Liu, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2026. Find out more about the book here, and get your copy here. 

Outsiders have long reduced China to simplistic narratives at oppo­site extremes: China is at once an unstoppable economic juggernaut of boundless opportunity and an omnipotent, techno-authoritarian regime of repression. In English-language media, news on China is increasingly filtered through the lens of US national security interests, where China is often named the “biggest threat” to the United States. On bookshelves, such titles as When China Rules the World sit beside books on The Coming Collapse of China. In a scroll through my newsfeed, analyses of “China’s Two Paths to Global Domination” follow an article headlined the “great fall of china”? china “has never been weaker than it is today.” In the first China, anything is possible; in the second, the window of change is closed and locked. It follows, then, that a Chinese person can have only one of two identities: an apologist of the regime or a dissident, its beneficiary or its victim, a patriot or a traitor.

These narratives present an unchanging monolith, stripping individuals of their agency and failing to capture the society that I lived in, in all its dynamism and contradiction. Rich with innova­tion and yet rigidly constrained, life in China was filled with fear and ennui but also creativity and potential. Hip-hop music went viral there and soared to mainstream popularity within a month, then got banned by authorities the next; a gay dating app was shut down one year, while another went public a couple years later.

Anyone wishing to navigate this shifting terrain needed to remain agile and nimble. Those who tried to do so played with language itself. In my years of reporting in and out of the country, people have introduced me to an array of different metaphors to capture this unstable experience. Artists who tiptoed around the capricious line of the censor described the process as “a game of cat and mouse.” Entrepreneurs compared the experience of predicting the state’s limits on their actions as akin to divining the weather: hazy, fickle, and shifting without warning. Bloggers who wanted to pen provocative posts used the table tennis term “playing boundary ball”—serving a hit at the edge of the opponent’s table while stay­ing safely within bounds.

The metaphor I found most apt and most enduring was that of the “dance in shackles.” As far as I could tell, its first use came in the early 2000s by Chinese journalists describing what they could achieve under state constraints on their writing and reporting. Since then, I have seen the phrase used everywhere, by software engineers and musicians alike. “In China, every enterprise and individual has to dance with shackles on,” one tech executive wrote in a viral blog post, chastising Google’s withdrawal from the Chinese mar­ket in 2010. “Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it,” the writer Liu Cixin wrote in the afterword of the English-language edition of his science fiction epic The Three-Body Problem. “And I can only dance in my chains.” “Dancing in Shackles” was the title of a song by beloved Chinese indie rock band Miserable Faith, a shape-shifter of the Beijing music scene.

My reporting, both for this book and for stories I pursued before undertaking it, affirmed the power of this metaphor. To live in China is to participate in a dance: a dynamic push and pull between state and society. Censor and censored tango to an erratic rhythm of subversion and acquiescence. Artists act as both critics and collabo­rators of the state. Authorities and entrepreneurs find themselves at times in hostile confrontation and at other times entangled in mutual embrace. Nowhere has the drama of this Chinese dance been more evident than on its internet.

This book is about that dance, which has evolved over the past three decades, a period that encapsulates China’s transformation into both the world’s largest online user base and one of its longest-running authoritarian states. It begins in 1995, in the heady days of China’s opening, when ordinary Chinese people first logged on to the internet, swept up by its liberatory potential. It follows the flowering of China’s mobile internet in the 2010s, as Chinese cyber­space transformed into a walled garden—on one hand, blooming with new innovations and subcultures, and on the other, increas­ingly constrained and segregated from the global web. It ends in the wake of the pandemic, as China tightens control of the public sphere, closes its physical and virtual borders, and turns inward, away from the world.

This shift from liberalization toward retrenchment is not new: For much of modern Chinese history, society has moved in cycles of what scholars have observed as fang and shou, opening and tight­ening. The repressive era of Mao’s Cultural Revolution preceded a period of pragmatic loosening; the freewheeling reforms of the 1980s were followed by the Tiananmen crackdown. When the sys­tem opens up too quickly, destabilizing state power, authorities step in to assert control; when their grip becomes too rigid, calls for reform emerge, provoking a loosening again. But this time, this shift takes place amid a global technological turn—from the early promise of a free and open World Wide Web to one that has become closed, siloed, and commoditized.

Most crucially, this book is told through the stories of people I have come to call dancers: individuals pushing for greater open­ness and freedom within the state’s shifting bounds on the Chinese internet and, more broadly, in Chinese public life. How has China’s embrace of the internet both unleashed and also suppressed their dreams and aspirations as entrepreneurial, intellectual, and crea­tive beings? Faced with the encroachment of authority on both their offline and online lives, how have they continued to navigate a dance between confrontation and compromise to challenge the status quo?

Although their backgrounds and worldviews are diverse, their stories are united by their struggles and dreams and disappoint­ments. In spotlighting the book’s protagonists, I turned my attention to the margins, the underground, the subaltern, where I believed the most creative, imaginative dances bloomed: queer communi­ties, feminist activist groups, the hip-hop underground, and sci­ence fiction writing circles. There is Ma Baoli, once a closeted cop from Northern China running an underground gay website, who transforms into an openly gay tech mogul, steering the largest gay social networking app through precarious political terrain. Kafe Hu, an aspiring rapper from Sichuan, who learns to toe the line of the provocative and permissible to articulate a voice of his own. Lü Pin, a journalist turned activist, who taps into a nationwide feminist awakening and builds a grassroots movement across China and its diaspora. Chen Qiufan, a tech worker turned science fiction writer, who—fascinated by and skeptical of the nation’s rapid technological rise—strives to imagine alternative visions of the future.

Although they live and work on the margins, they know how to operate in the mainstream. They are idealistic and pragmatic, wear many hats, speak several tongues. They have come to understand that survival in the system requires adaptability, creativity, and the ability to identify leverage points—situations when a right push with just-so timing and force can open possibilities for change. Hav­ing lived through a period of both unprecedented economic open­ing and tightening political control, each has undergone immense personal transformation and, in that process, has been forced to grapple with questions about success and authenticity, love and soli­darity, faith and survival. How will Ma harness the mobile internet to help millions of other queer Chinese love more freely? How will Lü sustain the feminist movement, and what must she sacrifice in the name of her beliefs?

Brought together, their stories show that even in increasingly repressive conditions, within the most sophisticated systems of con­trol, individuals continue to push for dignity and freedom. When headlines warn of a bifurcated internet, these divisions extend down to the intimate and the individual, each crack in cyberspace running deep into flesh and bone. Changing the system, their stories reveal, begins with changing the self.

(c) Yi-Ling Liu

Explore the full list of 2026 Orwell Prize finalists, and read further extracts from the books, here.

This is an extract from For the Sun After Long Nights by Nilo Tabrizy and Fatemeh Jamalpour, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2026. Find out more about the book here, and get your copy here. 

For the imprisoned elites

For feeling at ease

For the sun after long nights

For all the nerves and insomnia pills

For Woman, Life, Freedom

For Freedom

For Freedom

For Freedom

—Shervin Hajipour, “Baraye”

NILO AND FATEMEH

On September 16, 2022, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Jîna Amini was killed in Tehran by the city’s morality police. She was viciously beaten after having been detained by an officer who accused her of not dressing appropriately in public, in defiance of the country’s hijab rule, which broadly governs what women should wear. As this horrible incident was unraveling, details were quickly disseminated by a handful of local journalists on social media. Sajjad Khodakarami, an independent Iranian journalist based in Istanbul, broke the news of Jîna’s assault on Twitter, sharing that on September 13 she “was treated in Tehran’s Kasra Hospital due to severe injuries, including brain damage.”† On the same day, Hamed Shafiei, a reporter who covered political and local news for Shargh, one of the largest and most prominent Iranian newspapers, posted an Instagram story. He wrote, “I went to Kasra Hospital. The atmosphere was tense there, and people were shouting, ‘They killed someone’s daughter. The police killed her. The morality police killed her.’” The accompanying image of Jîna lying unconscious in a hospital bed, with a swollen face, tubes coming out of her mouth, and dried blood on her ears, went viral.

As these threads of reporting began to come together, the regime tried to shut down coverage of the story. A police spokesperson told reporters at Shargh to disregard the incident with Jîna—that publishing what was happening at the hospital would only cause trouble for Shargh and for the police. But the regime couldn’t stop what was already in motion. The news continued to be shared all over various platforms, both by media outlets and by individual reporters. And when Jîna succumbed to her injuries on September 16, the Shargh reporter Niloofar Hamedi defied orders to keep quiet and told the world about her death in a tweet. Alongside a photo of Jîna’s grandmother and father wrapped in a tight, tearful embrace outside the closed door of the ICU, Niloofar wrote that “the black dress of mourning has become our national flag.”

The Islamic Republic stood firm in its claim that Jîna had died due to a health issue, denying that the morality police had beaten her to death. But Iranians knew better, and the Friday after Jîna’s death swarms of people, mostly women, congregated in front of Kasra Hospital, overflowing with rage about seeing another one of our young women disposed of by the security state with such casual cruelty. Morality police vans, plainclothes officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and riot police surrounded the hospital to try to prevent people from mourning and demonstrating. Authorities started to violently arrest people, shooting at and beating them.

Elaheh Khosravi was one of the first journalists on the scene. After the commotion made it impossible to stay at the hospital, she walked down Alvand Street to Argentina Square nearby. There, she witnessed and reported on an act of protest and mourning that became a symbol of the 2022 movement that followed Jîna’s death: a young woman, scissors in hand, cutting off her ponytail while shouting, “You [the regime] are forever dishonorable!”

ς

For those of us in Iran who have lived through destruction, war, and turmoil, poetry and literature have always been our shelter. In some cultures, poetry is for the elite. Yet in Iran, it’s for the masses. Nearly every Iranian, regardless of economic status or educational level, knows the great Persian poets. Even those who cannot read can recite, from memory, a favorite verse written by Hafez or Rumi. Poetry has seeped its way into our being; it’s part of our very Iranianness. And it isn’t only delicate or whimsical. It is now and has always been political.

It’s fitting, then, that the legacy of Jîna’s death and the movement it would inspire would unfurl in real time through revolutionary songs and poetic slogans chanted at demonstrations and recorded in protest graffiti that covered the walls and streets that the authorities took from our people. For centuries, narrative expression has shaped how we bring life to the most urgent issues for our people. One of the earliest poetic works that collectively shaped us is the Shahnameh, an epic poem by the Persian poet Ferdowsi. In AD 977, Ferdowsi began writing a story in more than fifty thousand rhyming couplets about the mythical tales of ancient Iran. It took Ferdowsi more than forty-three years to complete this narrative, writing amid the Arab invasion that imposed a new language and religion on our people. Taking care to intentionally use Persian words, Ferdowsi preserved our language and history at a time when it could have been lost forever. Word by word, story by story, we have survived our oppressors by force, with narrative as our lifeline.

A then-twenty-five-year-old singer named Shervin Hajipour began gathering our hopes, stringing them together into a ballad called “Baraye,” meaning “For.” As the guitar comes in to form a sparse music bed, Hajipour’s powerful and graceful voice echoes Iranians’ longings. Transformed into a vessel, he runs down the endless reasons that pushed people out of their homes and into the streets in daily protest:

For dancing in the streets

For our fear when kissing loved ones

For my sister, your sister, our sisters

For the changing of rotted minds.

Perhaps accidentally, or instinctually, Hajipour joined the centuries-long tradition of verse as political commentary that is a foundational pillar of our national identity. When he posted the song to his Instagram in the early days of the movement, it was viewed more than forty million times in less than two days. In writing and sharing this song, Hajipour was not only the dust beneath our feet, standing with us firmly and completely, but also our voice, our eyes, our hearts.

Two days after Hajipour shared “Baraye” online, he was summoned by the police and questioned for “encouragement to protest,” later released on bail in October 2022. He was barred from leaving Iran and lived life in limbo for two years while awaiting sentencing. In a video uploaded to Instagram on July 30, 2024, he finally informed his followers that he was ordered to turn himself in to begin serving a three-year-and-eight-month sentence for the lyrics in “Baraye.” Though his travel ban had by then been lifted, Hajipour said in the video that he would serve his sentence rather than leave Iran.

“For me it’s a question of how else was I supposed to protest? How else could I have critiqued what was going on?” he said, speaking directly to the camera, his voice lightly trembling. “Was there a more peaceful, civil way other than ‘Baraye’?”

Even the most beautiful, nonviolent means of expression are unsafe in Iran. Songs, reporting, and the strengthening of community under unlikely circumstances threaten the regime’s existence. For each Hajipour who is silenced, new words, verses, and slogans will rise, finding their ways into our bodies as we shout them into existence at a protest or write them online to live forever.

(c) Nilo Tabrizy and Fatemeh Jamalpour

Explore the full list of 2026 Orwell Prize finalists, and read further extracts from the books, here.

This is an extract from This is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2026. Find out more about the book here, and get your copy here. 

Bayazid never knew how he came to be a little boy alone in the streets of Rawalpindi. He had a memory more of forces than of people, a crowd, a hand, a hand no more. Yet the bazaars in those early 1950s were not so crowded as that, and Rawalpindi a town small enough that a lost little boy should be found. That was a bitter day when he accepted years later that there might have been no hand, no desperate parent seeking him in the crowd. He might have been abandoned, not lost. Karim Khan, the owner of the tea and curry stall where his known history began, could tell him only that he had been sitting in front of the stall on a fine winter day, three or four years old, wearing just a shalvar kameez, barefoot and clean, holding a new pair of cheap plastic shoes tightly in his arms as if afraid they would be taken away, and scanning the crowds passing by. The shoes had caught Karim Khan’s eye, not only because they were brand-new, but because the children of the streets, those sparrows, ran barefoot always. In those early years following the great Indian Partition, families drifted about, mothers dead, fathers dead, murdered for religion’s sake, for politics, unwelcome children without parents thrown on some relative’s mercy. Karim Khan thought this must be one of those stories, Hindus stuck on the wrong side of the border and on the run, an unwanted child—though that didn’t explain the shoes.

Karim Khan kept an eye on the boy all through the afternoon and evening, serving customers by the light of a hissing pressure-gas lantern, dishing up dal or a meat curry that grew more delicious each year, for he never washed out the fire-blackened pots that sat over the coals, but replenished them with a double handful of lentils or meat, beef or mutton, whichever was cheaper, the mix of meat juices adding to its savor. The boy had a remarkable power of concentration, immobile all day and seeming quite unperturbed, but for the fierceness with which he held the shoes. He stood out even then as a person not to be treated lightly, as a being with resources of spirit if not of fortune. When Karim Khan finally approached him, the boy brushed him off, politely but firmly. He was waiting for his mother, who would soon be back, and must not move from this spot. Rebuffed, Karim Khan retreated back to his cook fire, the evening crowd getting a quick bite before taking a bus from the nearby station up to the mountains or out to the plains, for the shop served mostly travelers. Finally, when the crowds had died, when pye-dogs began sniffing around under the charpoys in front of the food stall for a last chicken bone or scrap of dry bread, when the lights in the shops along the road faltered out, and the cold came down from the Margalla Hills so that breath showed in a little cloud, Karim Khan went to the boy, and took his hand, and drew him away from the road and over by the fire.

“Come on, have a dish of my curry,” he told the boy. “You’re shivering, you’ll get sick. Sit here and eat, you can still keep watch.” The boy came along easily enough then, his will weakened by hunger, heavy-headed over food and then burrowing under a blanket that Karim Khan pulled over him, lying on a charpoy in the open-fronted veranda where the cook fire had just gone out, asleep so quick. At dawn he was back by the road, and for that whole day too he watched, not crying but just resolute, knowing that of course they would come back, his mother and father. Admiring the boy’s remarkable tenacity, pitying him, Karim Khan fed him morning, midday, and evening with unsold chapattis and the leavings from customers’ half-eaten plates—which otherwise would be poured back into the general pot. That evening Karim Khan said to him firmly, “Come on, little man. I’m not rich enough to feed you on charity. From now on you clean up and carry out the plates and then we’ll see. Until your people come.” Earlier he had been to the nearby police station but, as he expected, found the duty officer there quite uninterested in a street boy’s troubles. In any case, the boy had struck his fancy, though no one would have accused that Mardani Pathan of being fanciful, with his wife back home awaiting money and three daughters there to feed, and this food stall his enterprise, and his pride too—he’d built it up from a little cart that he hawked around the train station.

Karim Khan, who was a good man, took the boy in and named him Bayazid, after a Sufi mystic who was known to him rather as a magician, jhadoo ghar—more fancy, indulging himself in poetry!—and treated him not like a son, perhaps, but like a cherished apprentice, miniature serving boy, dishwasher, runner, paid in food and treated unsentimentally but fairly, hardly any use at first, then gradually indispensable. Yazid grew up exceptionally large for a Pakistani, six feet tall by the time he first began shaving, and strong: big hands, big feet, a large head. He tended to be slovenly rather than unclean, ate enormously but without much discrimination, worked day and night slowly but implacably, and was a neighborhood pet as a little boy, and a person of accepted station by the time he was thirteen. He didn’t banter or fling himself around, as teahouse boys often do—but had a humor that called forth smiles in return, and accepted all who accepted him, and damn the rest, and even them he forgave easily.

Most remarkably, Yazid had a long view of bettering himself, told to no one, an ambling bear moving to his own North. He taught himself to read, first learning the alphabet, buying government school grammars with his own money, encouraged and corrected by one of the regular customers, a schoolteacher who came in the afternoons for a cup of tea, and whom he treated with ceremony and respect that kept the tuition flowing. To the extent that Karim Khan thought of such things, he accepted this as one of the boy’s caprices, a distraction in any station that he might achieve, but better than going to the cinema or flying kites. At ten Yazid would read aloud the Urdu newspaper to illiterate Karim Khan, a morning ritual after the shop was opened and before the customers came, choosing the stories that he knew his boss would like. At fourteen and fifteen he could be found whenever he wasn’t working reading gruesome stories of murder, or stories of thwarted love or lovers dying requited, bought secondhand from stalls and bound like magazines, with lurid pictures on the covers of fat-bummed girls and mustachioed men, lovers or enemies, kidnapped or eloping or on the lam, as only time and a hundred pages would tell. Yazid had charmed hands, became a master at making chapattis, hunkered cross-legged over the tandoor, slapping the flattened dough down into its orange glowing maw. He learned the technique of making nan, doing it so well that the shop became known for it, the local housewives bringing pots to fill with dal and curry, a treat for their poor homes in the nearby alleys, and a bundle of nan too, flecked with sesame seeds, oiled shiny, crisp and then soft inside, hot and wrapped in day-old newspapers. “Always your nose in a book,” said the regulars, and were rather proud of him as he handed over the goods and picked up and resumed his reading, sitting under a lone bulb hanging from a wire.

(c) Daniyal Mueenuddin 

Explore the full list of 2026 Orwell Prize finalists, and read further extracts from the books, here.

When I first heard the words, “You have Crohn’s disease,” it was the worst feeling ever. It wasn’t just the shock of the diagnosis, but the realisation of what it meant for my life.

The freedom I had taken for granted, like waking up, feeling healthy, going through my day without concern was gone. It’s hard to describe the emotional horror of suddenly being told that your body is betraying you, that the excruciatingly painful illness I’d had for the last month will forever be a part of me. It’s like being trapped in a body that is out to get me.

At first, I struggled to grasp the reality of living with a stomach that could attack me at any moment, changing the course of my day, or my week. There were times I couldn’t leave my house, couldn’t go to school, couldn’t see my friends. The physical pain was immediate and relentless: tiredness, pain, the uncertainty of never knowing when the next flare-up might hit. It felt like my freedom to simply live was being stripped away. What used to be a simple daily routine became awful, tiring and painful.

At first, I felt powerless, as if I was a punchbag for my body. But over time, I learned that while I couldn’t control the disease, I could control how I responded to it. Freedom wasn’t about doing everything I once could, it was about finding ways to live through the pain.

I started with small steps like adjusting my diet, sticking to my treatment plan, and learning to manage stress. The more I took control over what I could, the better I felt. But the real difficulty came when I figured out that freedom was as much about mindset as it was about physical health. I stopped seeing myself as a victim and began seeing myself as someone who can still lead a full life despite my condition.

Support from my family and friends helped reinforce this. They reminded me that they would help me no matter what. That sense of family made a big difference. Slowly, I reclaimed a version of myself that felt strong, capable, and free—someone who could live fully, even in the face of uncertainty.

Freedom, I’ve started to realise, isn’t about being free from pain or restrictions. It’s about finding moments of peace and strength despite them. Living with Crohn’s means that I can never escape the reality of my condition. The pain, fatigue, and unpredictability are constant. But rather than feeling sorry for myself, I’ve learned that freedom exists in how I choose to live with these challenges.

There are days when the weight of it all feels unbearable, when the pain is too much, and I long for the freedom of a “normal” life. But it’s on those days that I remind myself that living through the pain is still a form of freedom. It’s about deciding to keep going,

even when things aren’t easy. I’ve found that freedom lies not in avoiding struggle, but in choosing how I react to it.

Some days, the hardest part is the unpredictability. You can never quite plan for a flare-up and the annoyance of not knowing how you’ll feel tomorrow or next week is always there. It’s a mental challenge as much as it is a physical one. But through it all, I’ve

started to see that freedom isn’t about controlling every aspect of my life—it’s about

how I respond to those awful moments. I’ve learned to embrace the pain, accepting that some things are beyond my control, but my choices are not. Each day is a chance to rebuild myself, to reframe the narrative that Crohn’s will make my life worse and find something meaningful, even in the darkest of moments.

And while I can’t always predict when things will get tough, I can choose how I approach those times. I’ve learned to embrace the support of those around me, to prioritise my mental and emotional well-being as much as my physical health. It’s about building a life where freedom doesn’t just look like a world without challenges, but a life where I have the strength to meet those challenges head-on.

In the end, I’ve realised that freedom isn’t about the absence of pain or hardship. It’s about how we live through it. It’s the small victories—getting through a tough day of school, watching Leeds win after a long week, and having the strength to keep moving forward, even when it feels like everything is against you.

So even now, as I type this on my phone while lying in a hospital bed with a Gail’s cinnamon roll in hand, I know I am free. I may not be free from Crohn’s, but I will never let it control me. And that, to me, is enough.

The night air was thick with silence, broken only by the sound of Anne’s footsteps against the damp earth. Each step felt like a rebellion, each breath an act of defiance. For eighteen years, she had lived under the rigid laws of her family’s faith, where tradition was unquestionable and obedience demanded. They had their ways, their unshakable beliefs, their certainty that the world outside was corrupt. But Anne had glimpsed something different—something freer.

It began with books—ones she borrowed in secret, their pages whispering of worlds beyond her own. A tattered novel she found buried in a donation box had been her first window into another life. She read it in stolen moments, under her blanket, letting the words pull her into a reality she could only dream of. And so, the idea of freedom took root—not as a reckless escape, but as an inevitability.

She planned for months, collecting scraps of money from odd jobs, memorising the back roads leading out of town. The moment came when her father, the church elder, knelt in prayer, his voice a murmuring tide that lulled the household into complacency. She slipped out the back door, a small bag slung over her shoulder, carrying nothing but a change of clothes, the battered novel, and the hope that the world outside was kinder than she had been told.

The town disappeared behind her, swallowed by the darkness. The road stretched endlessly ahead, an open wound cutting through fields that smelled of damp earth and the last whispers of summer. Her heart pounded, half from fear, half from exhilaration. She had never been out this late. Never walked this far alone. Never existed beyond the confines of her family’s expectations. It was dizzying, yet exhilarating.

By dawn, she reached a layby along the main road. Lorries roared past, indifferent to the lone girl standing by the roadside. The enormity of her decision settled on her chest. She had no plan beyond escape. No one was waiting for her. The world she had been taught to fear now loomed vast and indifferent before her. But there was no turning back. Not now.

She walked for hours, her legs aching, her throat dry. A service station appeared ahead, its neon lights flickering against the grey morning. The air smelled of petrol and brewing coffee. She stepped inside, fingers grazing the shelves, marvelling at the endless choices—rows of crisps, bottled drinks, magazines she had never been allowed to read. Even something as simple as deciding what to buy felt overwhelming.

She took a bottle of water and a packet of biscuits to the counter, hesitating before handing over the money. The cashier barely glanced at her, muttering the total. The exchange felt significant—she had bought something for herself, by herself. A simple act, yet it severed the tie to her former life.

Stepping outside, she sat on the edge of the pavement, unscrewing the bottle cap with trembling hands. The morning was cool, a soft mist hanging in the distance. She watched cars come and go, people moving with purpose, each one knowing exactly where they were headed. That was freedom, wasn’t it? Not just leaving, but knowing where to go.

A man in a heavy coat filled his car with fuel. A woman loaded a sleepy child into the backseat. An elderly couple sipped tea from a thermos, their dog curled up between them. They all had destinations. They belonged somewhere.

Anne had never belonged anywhere.

She reached into her bag and pulled out the old novel, its spine cracked from years of secrecy. She turned its pages absently, tracing the faded words with her fingertips. The book had been her first escape, the first glimpse of something bigger. But now, in the real world, she found herself unmoored, unsteady. The idea of freedom had always seemed grand, intoxicating. But standing here, miles from home, she felt the crushing reality of it.

Freedom was not just flight. It was a choice. And choices carried their own burdens.

She thought of the characters she had read about—those who had known exactly what they wanted, who had run towards something, not just away. What did she want? Not safety. Not certainty. She wanted space to exist without fear. A chance to decide who she was without someone else’s voice telling her.

A bus pulled into the station, its brakes hissing as it came to a stop. Passengers disembarked, stretching stiff limbs, shaking off the weight of the journey. A sign on the front read its destination: a city she had never been to. She watched as people boarded, the driver barely looking up as they filed past. No one here knew her name. No one cared where she had come from.

The battered novel rested on her lap, its pages fluttering in the breeze. A story of someone who had dared to leave, who had found something worth running toward.

Anne stood, brushing dust from her jeans. She slung her bag over her shoulder, gripping the book tightly. She had always imagined freedom as a thing without weight, like the wind through an open window or a bird in flight. But standing here, she understood—wings were not light. They carried everything she had been, everything she hoped to become. And so, with quiet resolve, she stepped onto the bus, ready to bear their weight and soar.

Glass bottles glitter like stardust on the pavement. Along the road, debris; the remains of a telephone pole lies among scraps of burned cloth. Moonlight spills through the hostel window, the singular source of light when the street lamps have been smashed clean out. The clock to your right reads 23:47 in bright red, digital numbers flickering against a cracked screen.

The street is quieter than usual tonight. They don’t usually pass through here- opposite you, there are only parking garages crouched low to the ground; old offices in rundown buildings and restaurants with their shutter gates pulled closed. A little further down is the car dealership, precious goods hidden behind metal curtains. Luxury cars, perhaps. You roll the idea of driving an Aston Martin Vantage along the back of your mind, then put it away. The salary of a correspondent is far from enough to afford something like that.

Beneath your weight, the armchair creaks you as you shift. From far below comes the distant smell of smoke, a dumpster fire mingling with something chemical. Your lips purse, pressing thin as you peer outside. On the coffee table, opposite the TV, your laptop sits patiently, keyboard ticking like a minefield.

The half-written draft on the monitor is replaced by a red pop-up.

Warning – 10% Battery. Please charge.

Across the hallway, through the walls, you hear the thud as someone tumbles out of bed.

Tentatively, you move your head out of the window, craning your neck to peer down the rows of blacked-out glass. The moon is full tonight, hanging over grand, apathetic hills. Two teenagers lurk in the street below, dressed in black and sharing a cigarette. The darkness of their clothing is unassuming, their faces featureless. Your eyes take note of the shattered helmet at their feet and pass over them, sweeping along the street .

Some time ago, the street was filled by riot shields. A mass of bodies in the black; shouting in an unknown language. Men, treated like hounds; the crack of helmets against a baseball bat. You could only understand half of what they said, the rest lost both in translation and the noise of batons against bone. Now the silence has fallen across the street, acrid scent of tear gas lingering deep within your nose.

There are a thousand words for such an activity. Fighting comes first to mind. Riot, perhaps, protest. Violence your fellow writers had called it once, scribbling the word out on the draft as fast as it came. The laws seem to change as quick as the weather does, and beyond the public, there are other figures watching.

Hounds in the skin of men, barking out orders from the safety of a chain-link fence. (Hounds who could afford that Aston, ten times your salary.)

One of the pair looks up. The silence crashes like a wave across your back, throat pulling tight. Abruptly, you jolt back, darting away from the window as your shoulders pull tight. Your heart throws itself violently against your ribs, breathing reminiscent of a dog’s shallow pant. Your back presses against the armchair, fingers twitching as you close your eyes and pray yourself invisible.

The adrenaline bleeds through your system, each muscle wound tight on a thread.

Fear was not an emotion you had expected to know so intimately. Yet, you know exactly where it sits: in the hollow of your throat, in the nervous click of your heart. It seems to settle in you now, amber eyes wide open and peering out with curiosity. You have walked these very streets before. Now you can hardly turn the lights on. You cannot afford to be seen. You have been seen enough.

You sit there for a long moment, waiting with one hand on the blinds. When the outside is silent, you move back to the window again. Your breath shudders in your lungs before you turn away. A tiger on an old almanac paces its paper cage. Your work visa is expiring soon. You had never expected it to be so much of a problem. When you were young, you had never known such a problem at all. It had been in the time before identity, before words on a sheet of paper meant more than who you were as a human being. You had been born different, and as a result where doors were left open for your friends, they had been locked for you.

Even so, you had called it home.

When you moved out, your mother had made you promise to call every night.

Now, your cell phone is silent, face-up in the dark. The doors have stayed locked, even with a diploma. Freedom stays just out of reach.

You have tried every single key. Every single combination, everything you could possibly have done. But they stay closed. You have screamed, and shouted, and begged. You are still just slightly off. Not quite free, an inch from the exit door.

And here you are, watching the world pass.

It clicks when you sit down. What they are fighting for. They are fighting for the right to go through that door; to be free to choose. They are fighting, you think as your fingers drift across your keyboard, with one hand tied behind their back.

But they hope, still, that one of these days, it will be worth the fight.

Quietly, you find each instance of the word protester in your draft, and change it to person. The battery of your laptop flickers, then blacks out.

“This beautiful story captures the inchoate sense of home we all feel and the fear we all have that it is slipping through our fingers.” Vicky Spratt, author, housing correspondent for The i, and Orwell Youth Prize 2024 judge

“Every year,” Grandma says, “she comes back here.” 

“Why?” I ask. “She could go anywhere.” 

I can see the shadow of Grandma shrug, 

“If I was a swan,” I announce, chin held high, “I would see the world. I would fly to every country and swim in every river.” 

I am sat on my haunches, watching her intently through the gap in the winding brambles. Her feathers are a cluster of pearls against her nest. She studies me with an amber eye, one pale wing held over her ivory eggs. Eight of them. In all my pigtailed, sticky–cheeked curiosity, I simply did not believe my grandma. Why, out of anywhere in the whole world, would she come back here? 

“She came to this river once and kept coming back.” 

Summer rolls through the countryside, and I am crouched in a field of wildflowers, a pleasant wind disturbing the leaves of the willow tree, shielding my head from the beating sun. Insects chitter, grasshoppers leaping between blades of grass. I peek over the riverbank, scanning its surface for any sign of her. I hear her first – a squawk, a rustling of feathers, and then she glides across the water, followed by eight fuzzy shapes. They cheep at one another and flap their little wings. In the distance, through a copse of trees, I see the shapes of Mummy and Grandma, exchanging words with an emotion I can’t quite unpack. Mummy turns from Grandma and stomps away from her through the trees, toward my hiding place. I sink further into the field – hiding from what I know is to come. Mummy seizes me by the arm and drags me away from the river. I fight to steal a glance at my swan, but she is gone. Not even a ripple remains. 

Autumn blows by, leaving the trees bare of their summer clothes and mushrooms sprouting from between the fallen branches. I am stood on the canal side, braving the biting breeze with youthful determination. The leaves drift across the begrimed water, painting the surface with a carpet of ochre, deep maroon and muddy brown, a true image of autumn–time. The signets navigate the waters in a winding trail, following their mother at some distance now. They snap and squawk at each other with greater intensity, as if realising they are old enough to do so. Behind me, a shadow is cast across the water, a wavering image on the surface beside my own figure. I turn, half expecting my grandma, but I’m met with Mum. Her scleras are scattered with red lines, like scarlet bolts of lightning. She brings a hand up to my shoulder and together, we walk away. 

Winter arrives and they are gone. Jack Frost takes his icy fingers and trails them across the hills and horizons of the countryside. Hares retreat into their burrows, squirrels skittering through the dewy fields and up the stripped trunks of trees. Crystalline shards of ice create a jagged mandala across the surface of the water, snowdrops bowing their graceful heads over the bank of the river. I find myself missing them – I begin to understand, with each passing season, that Winter’s arrival means their departure. Before my journey to the river, I stand outside my mother’s bedroom door. The room is swallowed in darkness, the orange glow of the hallway light breaking the black. Sorry, not this time, love, she murmurs from beneath the covers. I turn and leave without closing the door, picking up my car keys. 

Each year is the same, though each year I seem to lose something more. The tide of the seasons comes in its regular ebb and flow, never pausing, never waiting, Eventually I stop coming to the river. 

One year. I stand beside a tower of cardboard boxes, teetering precariously before the boot of my car. Mum watches me from the front door, arms wrapped around herself. 

A year later I sit at my office desk, bringing my coffee to my lips. The steam rises off its surface in tendrils, reaching the ceiling and dispersing. 

Another year passes and I’m stood, hands clasped, surrounded by people I may have met before, or may have not. There is uncle, I note distantly. Her favourite song plays over the speakers – a familiar trill. 

By next year her face seems to be covered by a shield of mist in my mind. I wake up each morning and feel an absence of sorts that I cannot fill. I decide to return to the river. 

I scour the shrubbery, kicking up leaves as I navigate the beaten footpaths. I find the places I happen across vaguely familiar, as if they have appeared in long–forgotten dreams. Perhaps I had thought it up in my childlike wonder, days by the rivers shrouded in a golden haze- untouchable. After a while, I give up. Through my disappointment I feel a certain amusement. After all I had endured: adulthood, tricky relationships, colleges and classes, I find myself back at this place. This exact idea rings a distant bell in my mind. “Every year, she comes back here.” 

That’s it! 

“I get it now!” I call out to her; my voice is carried by the whistling wind across the canal. “I understand!” 

I am met with silence. Was she ever even here at all? 

As my chest rises and falls, I gather myself and prepare to leave. This was a silly idea. I can’t ever get those days back. Time passes despite our efforts, our resistance. Why should I try to fight it? 

A squawk. 

From behind the winding thorns, I see her. Her feathers are fallen snow among browning foliage and carefully entwined twigs. Beneath her wing are four eggs of ivory, gleaming in the shallow Spring sunlight. 

Despite harsh Winters, pounding Summers and unforgiving Autumns – she came back here. Right here. To where she had always been. 

Despite everything, she came home.

We asked previous winners and runners up of the Orwell Youth Prize to interview the 2023 cohort about their Orwell Youth Prize writing. Below, 2023 winner, Lara Wong, interviews 2024 runner-up, Niamh Whelan, about swan motifs, belonging and freedom:

Lara: I love how the imagery and your piece draws the reader into vivid and intimate memories. What inspired you to use the motif of a nesting swan throughout your piece?

Niamh: The story is inspired by my younger years spent by the canal side watching the wildlife. There are many tales about swans and the feeling of belonging – with one of the most famous being the Ugly Duckling, of course. But personally, I felt it would be important to include some representation of birds and their migratory patterns. After all, even when we ‘leave the nest’ we always come home for Christmas, don’t we?

Lara: The short story navigates a complex relationship with home and family. What kind of conflicts do you think arise when it comes to belonging and freedom?

Niamh: I believe that no matter where we go in life, we always carry a part of home within us. Despite this, many people struggle to find their way in the world without leaving the place that they were born. Living in a small town, I see this all the time. There may be a sense of obligation or guilt to your home or family – but if pursuing your own personal freedom means leaving those behind, then that is far more important.

Lara: The passage of time seems to be a core part of the piece. What do you think about the importance of having a constant home over the years and the difficulties that come with maintaining this connection?

Niamh: Having a home of some sorts is extremely important, though staying in one place is not a vital part of this. Many nomadic peoples have shared this sentiment over the centuries. Some say that ‘home is where the heart is’, and I suppose this is true. Some may feel they will never truly belong anywhere as much as they belong in their hometown or city, but your home does not define you. It definitely shapes you, in some ways, but we can choose to let go of this to become our own person.

“Lest we forget in a time of relative freedom, here’s a powerful vignette of recent bad times when LBGTQ people lived in real fear of exposure. The emotions of an older couple liberated to love by the 1967 change in the law touch the heart, and should remind us how many round the world still suffer in fear.” Polly Toynbee, Orwell Prize-winning political and social commentator for The Guardian, and Orwell Youth Prize 2024 judge
“In very few words, Florence has captured a life-changing moment with clarity and wonder.  Of course, the perception of gay people didn’t change immediately with the passing of the law.  Older readers still come up to me at events amazed and delighted that a gay marriage can be portrayed without comment in popular fiction and television drama.  But this piece marks the beginning of hope.” Ann Cleeves OBE, award-winning novelist

PHOENIX 

As I looked up at the clock I realised that I now had a quarter of an hour until William arrived so I decided to open up today’s paper. There weren’t normally many news articles that interested me, but I looked through them anyway. Nationalisation of the British Steel Industry, The Airing of Charlie Chaplin’s Last Film and The Release of the Beatles Album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. I was about to put the paper down when a headline caught my eye, and my heartbeat accelerated as I read it. 

22/04/1967 

As of today, homosexual partnerships between men are legalised. Having been introduced into Parliament earlier this month and with much debate since, they recently approved it earlier this week, now making it legal. 

I read it twice more through eyes that burned with tears almost instantly, the second time closing the paper and opening it again, nearly dropping it because my hands were shaking so much, but it was true. We were finally legal. 

I couldn’t help but let my emotion out; tears contrasting with my smile as if they couldn’t decide which power should take over, yet with the blossoming of my heart it seemed obvious. It wasn’t very often that I let my emotions get the better of me, but I’d already decided that today was an exception, in more ways than one. 

My eyes had now settled on a green and white armchair which was one of the only pieces of furniture that I’d kept since the 1930s and my brain flicked through images of William sitting in it. They compared then and now, young and old, as if my unfocused vision had split it in two. 

It reminded me that I shouldn’t worry about the state William found me in; for all I knew he might have a similar reaction, though part of me still believed that my feelings for him weren’t actually reciprocated… 

I was snapped back to reality by the click of the door, on time as always, and my heart hammered in my chest as I thought of telling him today’s news. 

WILLIAM 

When I arrived at Phoenix’s house it had just gone 10:00, and I let myself in with the spare key that he’d given me recently, not wanting to disturb him any more than I had to. The door to his bedroom was open slightly and I couldn’t help but look in to see Phoenix with his head in his hands and, to my observation crying, though with a content look on his face, not with sadness. I realised then how little I’d seen him cry, only when we both returned from war alive, though I had definitely cried then too. 

I made my way in and watched as Phoenix looked up at me, the familiar look of adoration piercing through the tears. His blue eyes shone and were as bright as ever, the only part of his face that was still identical to in his youth. Phoenix’s hair also caught the early morning sun, highlighting the white in his fringe. 

“Are you alright?” I asked as I sat down on the bed next to him, only realising then that he was holding today’s paper in his violently shaking hands. 

“Yes, actually.” he replied before adding, “You should read this,” handing the paper to me so quickly that he almost dropped it.

My eyes were instantly drawn to a headline near the bottom of the page, the first word smudged slightly, as if Phoenix had started tracing it with a wet finger, and I soon realised why. 

“What?!” I stuttered out, heart racing as I read the words again and again, checking their reality more times than was necessary. 

“I don’t know…” he started, voice monotone, and I replied before he could say something self deprecating like I could tell he was going to: 

“That’s brilliant!” I said louder than I probably should have, pulling Phoenix closer into a tight hug before placing a kiss on his cheek; his face blushing instantly, still not used to it after 22 years. He surprised me then by reaching out with a still shaking hand and cupping my jaw before mirroring the kiss but on my lips instead, which seemed to happen rarely despite being together. I guess it could happen now, legally, which I still didn’t think was possible, at least not in my lifetime. But I guess these things happen, however surprising. Most of the time I still don’t understand how my love for Phoenix can be reciprocated, so this would probably also take a long time to get used to. 

“We should go out to celebrate.” I suggested, now that we were sitting on the bed wondering what to do with ourselves. Phoenix nodded in agreement before suggesting: “We could go to Friend of Dorothy’s,” which was our favorite café from before the war and one of the only businesses that remained almost perfectly intact, which I still found surprising. 

There was no need for any sort of coat today, the weather being an image of perfection; the only cloud in the sky being a small one, almost heart shaped and shaded with light from the sun, which I thought could definitely be a symbol for today. 

When we were out of the house I instantly took hold of Phoenix’s hand, without thought on my part, and felt his body flinch slightly away from me, as surprised by my subconscious as I was. 

“We should probably still be careful,” he stated as he turned to look at me, his face a mix of emotions that wouldn’t be hard to unpack. 

“Yeah, I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.” 

“It’s alright,” he replied as we continued walking along, in step as always. My next idea was to link arms, slotting my left arm through his right, and turning my head slightly to face him and try to see a reaction. After getting nothing from his face I asked him “How about this?” to which he replied, “Perfect.” 

We were still catching up on our day spent without each other when I opened the door to the café; eyes instantly drawn to the colour of the deep red roses that occupied every table, and as we walked over to our usual one in the corner, I noticed a label was attached, and I read Phoenix and William through teary eyes. 

Phoenix picked up one of the flowers and held it out for me, with slight hesitation, before reaching out and wiping away one of my tears that was glad, like me, to finally be free. 

PHOENIX 

When I woke up the next morning I realised that it was still early, the orange sun filtering through the curtains that I’d forgotten to close properly, which I decided was probably why I’d woken up. I managed to struggle onto my side to try and get back to sleep when I was reminded of a presence beside me, a warm and steady breath on my neck where William’s head perfectly fitted between my head and shoulder. I let out a sigh followed by a yawn, heart stuttering slightly as I remembered the foreign yet welcome reality we’d come to as partners just the night before.

Instead of going back to sleep I lay there as memories danced through my brain of the forty years we’d known each other, from quiet coffees at Friend of Dorothy’s to our weekly meetings that we both enjoyed so dearly, managing to talk about practically anything for at least an hour with the sun that liked to show itself the minute it turned 10am on a Saturday. They then moved to post-war, when we decided to meet every other day and stayed together for most of it, though always leaving before the sun set, leaving each other to an awfully long day separated. I smiled as I remembered that this no longer had to be the case. 

The sun moved as I lay there, getting brighter with every passing minute, streaking over my double bed that had always felt so empty, until it was bright enough to induce a stir from beside me, followed by a stretch, as William started to wake up. 

I moved onto my back again and caught a blur of his hair, which was once sand coloured but was now almost completely silver, moving next to me, causing me to turn around again so I could look at him properly. I watched his hazel eyes dart around the room a couple of times as they got used to the light, before he asked me in a voice a tone lower than it normally was: 

“Where am I?” 

“Home.” I replied with a smile, watching as his mouth mirrored mine when he was reminded of our reality, highlighting the wrinkles around his eyes. The sparkles in them showed nothing but raw and pure joy as he stared into mine, which I’m sure were reflections of his.

We asked previous winners and runners up of the Orwell Youth Prize to interview the 2023 cohort about their Orwell Youth Prize writing. Below, 2023 winner, Heike Ghandi, interviews 2024 winner, Florence Alsop, about character perspective, real life inspiration, and titles:

Heike: The perspective shifts from Phoenix to William back to Phoenix by the end of the story. What made you choose the shift in the narrator and are the names aptronyms?

Florence: Perspective shifts have interested me in writing for a while now, because of how different the characters’ voices can be, and I really enjoy exploring this in my writing. I also thought that because of my choice of topic it’d be interesting to show how my characters experienced the changes in the law differently as it must have been such a personal thing and therefore the characters’ stories would have been as unique as they are. Lastly I tried to mirror Phoenix and William’s voices in the other one’s perspective to show how close they are and could show what they were both thinking, like the mirroring of both Phoenix and William still being surprised that their feelings for each other were reciprocated, which was reflective of them having to hide at the time too.

As for the names, the characters were originally from a book I started writing with one of my friends so we came up with the names together, Phoenix being one of the main characters and William being his partner. In the book William is a singer and Phoenix is his manager. The names are not aptronyms as such but we chose a name each and they just worked, and we haven’t changed them since.

Heike: The ‘Friend of Dorothy’s’ cafe is a beacon of safety for the characters in the story. Were you inspired by a particular place in real life? If not, what do you imagine it to be like?

Florence: The café wasn’t inspired by any particular place at the time of writing but I’ve recently realised it was inspired by one near my house where my family and I often ride to on bikes. It has always had a really cosy and homey feel. It’s the sort that is decorated with mismatched sofas, granny squares and a lot of colour, and always has great cakes and ice creams. It’s just a really nice place where I think anyone would feel safe, and despite my story being set in the 1960’s, I think they’d definitely like it if they were alive today.

Heike: The title of the story perfectly captures the atmosphere of 1967, how did you come up with it?

Florence: I’m not really sure where the original idea came from but it was going to be called ‘love behind closed doors’, but I changed it to ‘opening doors’ to try and reflect the new freedom that came with the changing of the law in 1967, as gay men were allowed to love ‘openly’ rather than having to hide it.