Search Results for: why i write

Peter Davison’s magisterial Orwell: The Complete Works (1998) prints 26 poems by, or ascribed to, George Orwell. They range, chronologically, from ‘Awake Young Men of England’, a jingoistic call-to-arms that appeared in The Henley and South Oxfordshire Herald two months after the start of the Great War, to the nine laconic stanzas of ‘Memories of the Blitz’, printed in a January 1944 number of Tribune shortly after Orwell’s arrival there as literary editor. Of the 26, several are doubtful attributions affixed to unsigned work in Eton ephemerals. There are also two items for which Davison reserves the less lofty description of ‘verse’: an Eton squib from 1920 and the brief ‘Suggested by a toothpaste advertisement’, which probably dates from his Burma years. To judge from the hints dropped elsewhere in The Complete Works, these slim gleanings clearly represent only a fraction of Orwell’s true poetic output. In ‘Why I Write’, he remembers, aged four or five, dictating a poem about a tiger with ‘chair-like teeth’, presumably inspired by Blake’s ‘Tyger, tyger’ to his mother. There is also mention of ‘bad and usually unfinished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian style.’ Biographers have turned up at least one additional ‘lost’ item. Dora Georges, a schoolgirl who met him in Southwold in 1930, was presented with an ‘Ode to a Dark Lady’, which she kept for some years but later destroyed. All this suggests if not a thorough-going determination to ‘be a poet’, as his younger contemporary Stephen Spender once put it, then an enthusiasm for poetry that in these formative years seems to have been as least as strong as any desire to write fiction.

What remains may be divided up into six more-or-less distinct categories: patriotic juvenilia (a second poem appeared in The Henley and South Oxfordshire Herald two years later, mourning the death of Kitchener); three poems presented to his teenaged inamorata Jacintha Buddicom; contributions to Eton ephemerals; a small group that Davison plausibly dates to his time in Burma, from 1922 to 1927; half-a-dozen written in the period 1933-36 when he was establishing himself as a writer; and, finally, a very few from the 1940s. These include what is perhaps his best-known poem, ‘The Italian Soldier Shook My Hand’, with its ringing final stanza ‘But that thing I saw in your face/Nothing can disinherit/No bomb that ever burst/Shatters the crystal spirit’ (a pendant to the essay ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ which appeared in 1942 but is dated by the author to 1939) and an extended pastiche, the Byronic stanzas traded with the pacifist poet ‘Obadiah Hornbooke’ (Alex Comfort) under the heading of ‘As One Non-combatant to Another’, which appeared in Tribune in June 1943.

Undoubtedly poetry played a vital part in the development of Orwell’s literary sensibility. The discovery of Paradise Lost, and in particular the lines ‘So hee with difficulty and labour hard/Moved on with difficulty and labour hee’ (which he later recalled ‘do not now seem to me so very wonderful’) brought home to the 16 year-old Eton schoolboy what he called ‘the joy of mere words.’ He harboured serious poetic ambitions until at least his later twenties: a letter written to his agent Leonard Moore from his school-teaching job at Hayes in the early 1930s mentions a long poem about a day out in London, ‘which may be finished by the end of the term.’ As ‘London Pleasures’, envisaged as a 2,000-line epic in rhyme royal, ‘the kind of thing that should only be undertaken by people with endless leisure’, this survives to haunt Gordon Comstock’s long hours of solitary brooding over the gas-fire in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). In some ways the entire novel may be read as a rather mordant commentary on Orwell’s poetic ‘side’. While as a mature writer his output was limited to intermittent vers d’occasion, his interest in the form endured. As literary editor of Tribune, and as a talks producer on the BBC’s Eastern Service, he encouraged young poets such as J.M. Tambimuttu, Paul Potts and Nicholas Moore.

His tastes – in so far as he deliberately let them slip – were, in the context of the literary world in which he moved, rather old-fashioned. As a teenager he liked Rupert Brooke and Robert Service, a copy of whose collected poems he presented to his fag as a leaving present. As an adult he continued to esteem such Edwardian titans as Kipling and Housman (whom he met when dining with his old Eton tutor A.S.F. Gow at Cambridge) and occasional late-flowerings of the ‘90s hothouse such as Ernest Dowson’s ‘Cynara’. When the modernist chips were down, he preferred the early Eliot – much of which he claimed to have memorised – to the more spiritually attuned poet of Four Quartets. A revealing review of Burnt Norton, East Coker and The Dry Salvages, written for Poetry London late in 1942, analyses this stance in some depth. Musing over Eliot’s career to date, it was clear to Orwell that ‘something has departed, some kind of current has been switched off.’ He attributed this decline to ‘a degeneration in Mr Eliot’s subject matter.’ The early poems – he is particularly struck by the ‘rocket burst’of ‘Prufrock’s closing lines – had advertised a ‘glowing despair’, but the first three of the Four Quartets offered only a ‘melancholy faith.’ Among younger poets of the 1930s, Orwell disparaged Auden as a ‘gutless Kipling’, a remark he later qualified, and violently disliked Stephen Spender (‘I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden and Spender’ he told the compilers of Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War in 1937), although the two men later met and became friends.

For a man who left school at the age of 18, with no formal training in English Literature other than the scraps picked up in the Hon. G.H. Lyttelton’s Extra English classes, Orwell’s knowledge of English poetry was considerable. As the essay ‘How the Poor Die’, an account of his stay in a Paris hospital in 1929, demonstrates, he was familiar with some of the murkier byways of Chaucer (Ravelston has the first six stanzas of The Man of Lawes tale summarised for him) and even so abstruse a part of the Victorian canon as Tennyson’s ‘The Children’s Hospital’. Keep The Aspidistra Flying, too, displays evidence of an insider’s absorption in the 1930s poetry scene, with its jokes about the kind of verse patronised by Ravelston, the editor of Antichrist (loosely modelled on Sir Richard Rees of The Adelphi), the reviews that Gordon fondly anticipates for the never-to-be-published ‘London Pleasures’ (‘a welcome relief from the Sitwell school’) and sly references to such long-forgotten ornaments of the Georgian era as John Drinkwater, whose Collected Poems, given to Gordon as a Christmas present by his sister Julia, is straightaway taken off and sold.

As for Orwell’s own poems, it would take a very brave critic to suggest that, seen in the round, they have any conspicuous merits. With a few flaring exceptions they are derivative, solemn and rather lifeless affairs. The triptych addressed to Jacintha Buddicom are curiously formal in conception: not quite as fatalistic as Housman perhaps, but just as gloomy (‘Friendship and Love’ ends with the claim that ‘My love can’t reach your heedless heart at all’). ‘The Lesser Evil’ and ‘When The Franks Have Lost Their Sway’, from the Burma period, are the callowest kind of apprentice work, portentous, self-pitying and, in purely technical terms, lacking in scansion. ‘Sometime in the middle autumn days’, the first of Orwell’s adult poems to be published, is a listless hommage a l’Eliot (‘And I see the people thronging the street/The death- people, they and I/Godless, rootless, like leaves drifting/Blind to the earth and to the sky’). Where Orwell succeeds as a poet, alternatively, is on the occasions when he either offers straightforward reportage or touches on some personal dilemma he is increasingly anxious to resolve. ‘Romance’, which is about a Burmese prostitute who sticks out for a higher fee, and provides ballast for that well-known biographers’ discussion topic: did Orwell sleep with Burmese women?), falls into the first category, as does ‘A dressed man and a naked man’, published in The Adelphi in October 1933, which versifies an episode first described in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

A dressed man and a naked man
Stood by the kip-house fire,
Watching the sooty cooking-pots
That bubble on the wire

And bidding tanners up and down
Bargaining for a deal,
Naked skin for empty skin,
Clothes against a meal

While ‘The Lesser Evil’ and ‘On a Ruined Farm near the His Master’s Voice Gramophone Factory’, published in The Adelphi in 1934, are negligible as poetry they gesture at preoccupations that would resurface in his prose work. ‘The Lesser Evil’, for example, sets up an opposition between conventional piety (the church where old maids caterwaul ‘a dismal tale of thorns and blood’) and the pleasures of the flesh (‘visits to the house of sin’). ‘On a Ruined Farm’ touches on what might be called the leitmotif of Orwell’s thought: the difficulty of bringing morality to secularism, formulating and applying objective standards in a world without God:

Yet when the trees were young, men still
Could choose their path. The winged soul
Not awash with double doubts, could fly
Arrow-like to an unseen God…

Best of all from this Thirties period is ‘St Andrew’s Day, 1935’, included in Keep The Aspidistra Flying, where bookseller’s assistant Gordon runs the first lines over his tongue as he stands looking out of the shop window, and ‘A Happy Vicar I Might Have Been…’, which survived to illuminate the analysis of ‘Why I Write.’ Rather than dealing in gloomy abstracts, or peddling the deeply romanticised anti-romanticism of the early poems, each is about a subject with which Orwell was trying hard to come to terms: ‘the Money God’ of inter-war consumer materialism, and the stand-off between old-style literary quietism and the direct political action. ‘St Andrew’s Day’ ends with a striking image, the idea of money as a ‘sleek, estranging shield’ (possibly the first reference to a condom in English poetry) placed ‘between the lover and his bride.’ ‘A Happy Vicar’ brushes aside the writer’s distaste for the modern world and ends with what is practically a call to arms:

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls
And woke to find it true
I wasn’t born for an age like this
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

If no great claims can be made for Orwell the poet, these occasional verses were a useful minor weapon in his literary armoury. Rather like Philip Larkin, who always regretted the passing of his short-lived career as a novelist, Orwell never forgot his early hankerings. ‘As One Non-Combatant to Another’, which runs to 160 lines, carries a terrific sense of relish, as well as displaying an enviable facility with the difficult terza rima form. It is significant, perhaps, that the experience that shaped his mature political views – fighting on the Republican side in Spain – and the symbolic moment in which these views took root in his mind should have inspired him to poetry. It was as if he believed, despite the sparseness of his poetic output and the relatively old-fashioned nature of his aesthetic stance, that there were some emotions that only a poem could satisfactorily contain.

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. Reproduced from Orwell: The Life (2003), by kind permission of the author.

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl’s bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn’t born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

Submitted to Adelphi magazine, later appeared in ‘Why I Write’. 1935

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

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Orwell Estate. All queries regarding rights should be addressed to the Estate’s representatives at A. M. Heath literary agency.

The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity – please consider making a donation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere.

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)

External links are being provided for informational purposes only; they do not constitute an endorsement or an approval by The Orwell Foundation of any of the products, services or opinions of the corporation or organisation or individual. The Foundation bears no responsibility for the accuracy, legality or content of the external site or for that of subsequent links. Contact the external site for answers to questions regarding its content.

“Set in a near-future Ukraine, with pitch-perfect dialogue, this story is brilliantly atmospheric. It will haunt you.” Patience Agbabi, poet, author and Orwell Youth Prize 2024 judge

– Name? 

– Mariia Pidvysotska. 

– Citizenship? 

– British. 

The eyes-X-rays shifted their focus on me. For a moment it seemed that a  different person was sitting in front of me. 

– Place of birth? 

Although the intonation remained learnt-monotonous, the eyes could not be  hidden. Behind the glassy stare a mocking light was smouldering. – Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. 

The light immediately flared up. It was burning, flaming up, trying to break  through the steel well-bred restraint. I felt the radiation of this heat. And then the  first tongues of the hellfire broke through, having left their sulphurous aftertaste in  the border guard’s answer: 

– The country and city are unauthorised, they do not exist. 

“But 30 years ago they existed…” 

He did not wait for an answer, and I had nothing to say. 

– What is the purpose of your visit? 

– Receiving the legacy. 

“Arrival. Dec. 01, 2053. Kiev. Russia”. The stamp slammed, like the door of  the prison cell that instantly closed behind my back. 

*** 

I left the airport and headed to take a taxi. It was difficult to walk, but not  because of a heavy suitcase. It seemed as if a cast-iron kettlebell was chained to my  feet. 

Several attempts to order a taxi through the app did not give a result. For many  years the Internet here had been special, isolated. Like any connection with the outside world. The phone refused to accept the card of a local operator purchased  immediately after the arrival. I approached the crowd of taxi drivers who were  milling and smoking around the entrance. 

– Excuse me, can you give me a lift? 

– “Good afternoon,” the man, who was ready to please me, smiled greedily. “Of  course, where are you going?” 

“Lesi Ukrainky Boulevard, 12” I answered automatically. As a child, I learnt  by heart the address, like my mum’s phone number. 

The taxi drivers glanced at each other, they looked confused. I forgot again that  now everything was different here. But one of the men approached me in a friendly  way and offered: 

– I will give you a ride. 

– Indeed? 

We moved a little further. 

– “Yes, it seems that you meant the Red Boulevard,” the driver made a short  pause, sighed and quietly muttered, “That is how it is called now…”

*** 

I turned on the music in my earphones to drown out the noise of the radio. The  border guard’s words left some mark of humiliation on my soul. It was aching, and  instead of cheering myself up and healing the wound, I decided to finish myself off  with the melancholic melody, with which I was riding in tune, playing with my eyes  on the bleached trunks of trees, as if on the keys of a piano. A low pavement fence  along the road was sparkling in thick layers of blue, white and red paint. In some  places blue and yellow colours had already gnawed holes for themselves to get some  air. 

Morning traffic jams, familiar since childhood, in which I used to nap on my  way to school, lulled me asleep again, as before. 

*** 

– Hello, my name is Lera. What is your name?* 

– I am Marichka.

– “Very nice to meet you,” the classmate smiled, and the question that changed  my life left her inquisitive plump lips, “Why do you speak Ukrainian, everyone here  speaks Russian?”* 

After that I started hiding something from my parents for the first time.

*** 

 The darkness subsided, and through the window I recognised my native street.  For some reason the entrance hall smelled special now. I slowly walked up the stairs,  stalling for time, preparing for that wave of memories which would flood me over  as soon as I crossed the threshold. For every moment lived there to once again  penetrate my blood and to spread over the body, tickling it pleasantly and  languorously. Even this anticipation was excitingly thrilling. 

And here was the door with number “46”, behind which little Marichka was  waiting, holding a balloon filled with home aromas, that she would pop as soon as  Mary stepped on the wooden parquet. The key was turned, the handle was pushed  down, the door was opened and… Nothing. Only a quiet whisper of dust. I took a  few steps into the flat to hear its breathing. My home did not recognise me, or I did  not understand it anymore… 

*** 

The cemetery. The abandoned and weed-ridden graves of the people who had  long been forgotten remained here. My parents were probably disliked even here.  Maybe it had been worth escaping? Many had managed to… 

My reflections on the parents’ choice were interrupted. For a moment it seemed  that I had mixed up the graves. Surnames and names—everything was wrong with  them. I perfectly remember that my dad’s last name was written in the Cyrillic script  as “Pidvysotskyi”, like mine. But by no means “Podvysotskyi”*. And my mum’s  last name also took on a non-native form. I felt unspeakably sorry for them. 

*** 

My dad’s lawyer, like everyone here, also suffered from chronic apathy. He  was sitting in the high leather chair and in his low detached voice was reading out  the testament, which I had already been familiar with in the UK. But I crossed half  of Europe for something else. After reading, the man slowly got up and left the  office. A few minutes later he came in with a black box and handed it to me.

*** 

The ride by underground seemed endless. The noise of the wheels was  becoming louder and louder, it pushed me out of reality, threw me into the abyss. In  recent years when I looked in the mirror, I saw an unfamiliar person, experienced  not my feelings, interwove not my thoughts, felt not my emotions. And it all started  30 years ago, when my home was taken away, together with my parents, cutting off  contact with them. That is how I lost myself, barely knowing myself. That is why,  crossing the threshold of my native home, I did not feel anything. 

But now, holding this box, I did not stall for time. I flew up the stairs to the top,  turning over the letters on the covered with writings walls of the entrance hall,  raising dust from my neighbours’ secrets and tearing off figures from the numbers  of the flats. I ran into the flat and headed to my desk. It was high time to find out  what the black square hid… 

I opened the lid of the darkness. There was a letter and a worn leather notebook.  On the paper, saturated with my dad’s smell, words were lined up in long, even  corridors, written in such painfully familiar handwriting. 

“Dear Mariia, 

I am writing to you in English, because I do not already know if you remember  and feel well in your native language. And it is safer this way. Mum and I miss you  so much. It is difficult for me to write this letter to you as an adult, because the last  time I saw you, you were a sixteen-year-old girl. Although it hurts that fate so cruelly  separated us and that you had to start your adult life so early and suddenly, I am still  glad that you live freely. If you have managed to come here and you are reading this  letter, then Ukraine is probably free again, or you are just stubborn. 

Unfortunately, we can only imagine what you are like now. And you do not  know what we have become. Therefore, I bequeath you my diary, because I did not 

have enough time to share all my thoughts during our cosy evening conversations at  the kitchen table. 

At least now we will speak with you like this. 

And I also left something valuable not only for you. In the kitchen, behind the  icon on the wall, there is a gap. There you will find a book. This is “Kobzar” by  Taras Shevchenko. I do not know how many undestroyed copies are left here, so  maybe this is the last one. Be very careful with it. Please, do not let it disappear.  Once it all started with it. And it will start again. 

Dad” 

I greedily swallowed everything till the last word. The room suddenly lacked  air. After impetuously opening the window and letting the frosty December into the  flat, I approached the icon with the letter in my hand and took out “Kobzar”. Holding  it in my hands and feeling frantic tachycardia, I opened the book to the first page: 

Bury me thus — and then arise! 

From fetters set you free! 

And with your foes’ unholy blood 

Baptise your liberty! 

*** 

I did not know how much time had passed since I felt that I was freezing.  Outside, because inside everything was burning, seething and reviving. In a moment  I rushed to clean the flat. I was dusting, removing spider-webs, washing the floor,  doing dishes, doing the laundry, fighting with dirt and rubbish as if with an enemy.  This was my home. I returned. I will not give it away to anyone. 

* Russian

“Brilliant – this writer has mastered the essay form and this one really packs a punch.” Vicky Spratt, author, housing correspondent for The i, and Orwell Youth Prize 2024 judge

“When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling.” So begins George Orwell in his essay The Lion and the Unicorn, written in 1941 [1]. But where is the British nation now? (Not unusually, as Orwell admits, he is conflating England and Britain. [2]

It might help if we first define Britishness. The writer of the Docu-Drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, Gwyneth Hughes, suggested of the sub-postmasters depicted, ”They’re so British, aren’t they? Everybody involved is British to the core,” [3] depicting their nationality as linked to an ability to discern injustice. It seems strange to suggest that the thoughts and feelings of over sixty million vastly different people, many of whom profoundly dislike each other, can be boiled down to a shared personality. How would you summarise Britain? 

In 1941 Orwell called Britain a nation of “shopkeepers at war.” [4] Let’s consult our modern-day oracle: Google. Try typing in Britain is a nation of… 

The first suggestion [5] I received was shopkeepers. Proof of Orwell’s description still being relevant? Just look at all our boarded-up shops and consider how reliant we are on online shopping. [6] 

To define our Britishness we must look at another suggestion: Immigrants. [7] Britain has become far more multicultural than in Orwell’s lifetime. What we derive from foreign arrivals is integral to our culture and national identity. Chicken tikka masala, a dish invented in Britain by immigrants, is oft-cited as Britain’s national dish. [8] [9] And which of us could do without the Italian pizza or pasta? Along with the cuisines they bring, immigrants are central to our public consciousness. The Somali-born Mo Farah’s Olympic triumphs won him BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Rita Ora and Dua Lipa, both from Kosovan refugee families, are just some of the immigrant British singers dominating our charts in recent years. Let’s not forget how crucial immigrants are to staffing our NHS and care systems. Twenty-first-century Britain is a multicultural, inclusive country where anyone can succeed. Right? 

Apparently not. In November 2023, the Times published an article by Matthew Syed, headlined “Migration is being used to enfeeble us,” [10] suggesting that immigration was being driven by “an autocratic axis of nations,” seeking to weaken Britain. 

“Immigration is destroying the British economy,” according to a recent Telegraph article, ‘Immigration is destroying the British economy’. [11] Spare a thought then for Luxembourg, which has 3.5 times the level of foreign-born nationals than the UK. [12] Luxembourg’s GDP per capita of £118,919 [13] warns Britain (£37,452 [14]) just what a menace immigration is to a nation. 

With University College London research showing that immigration benefits the British economy, [15] why do 63% of Brits believe immigration is too high? [16] Orwell suggests that “the famous ‘insularity’ and ‘xenophobia’ of the English is far stronger in the working class than in the bourgeoisie.” [17] Indeed, in the 2016 EU referendum, Leave received its highest support in working-class, deprived areas. [18] The belief that immigration is to blame for the lack of opportunities and increased anti-social behaviour in their areas is pervasive. 

So who benefits from this belief? 

As usual, it’s the rich. Orwell suggested that “there is not one paper in England that can be straight-forwardly bribed with hard cash,” [19] This was optimistic, and rather than bribery, nowadays billionaires simply buy newspapers, allowing them to control the message the public is given. [20] They can also use their riches to leverage influence over politicians and parties. [21] It suits them if immigration is blamed for our societal ills. No need to mention how the rich benefit from the austerity policies and neoliberalism which entrench inequality. [22] 

Mass immigration is not something new. It did not start with our entry to the EU or the arrival of the Empire Windrush. [23] 

Orwell’s Britain was also shaped by mass migration. Much of it can be traced to the instability caused by our slave trade [24] and our empire. [25] When British immigrants are accused of taking away opportunities from others, they can rightfully argue, “We are here because you were there.” [26] 

But historically, many Brits have left the country to seek new opportunities or escape the conflict and poverty that permeated much of the British Isles. [27] A decline in emigration from the UK in recent decades, with rising living standards [28] giving less reason to emigrate (at least until recently), is a success story. Britain has entered a rare period in which there are consistently more people moving to Britain than leaving it. [29] Why should that be a bad thing? 

British emigrants Andrew Carnegie and John Muir’s successes in America are justifiably celebrated in Britain. So why the struggle with accepting those born elsewhere as a key part of the British nation? (Exceptions are made for those whose families are white and rich, eg New York-born Boris Johnson.) 

Frankly, we need to realise that Britain is not a medieval castle to protect. 

An old-fashioned view of other nationalities is as strong now as when Orwell bemoaned “the dislike which nearly all foreigners feel for our national way of life.” [30] But his idea of a malevolent agenda against Britain is neither true nor useful as an excuse. Relative to our size and economy, Britain still has an outsized role in the cultural world, the UN and NATO. These roles are largely based on our historic power and will diminish as the world decolonises. [31] 

Our island location once gave us an advantage in seafaring and by extension wealth-building and slave trading. 

But as maritime dominance has proved impossible to maintain [32], we are perhaps a little isolated on our small island. 

Dean Acheson’s suggestion in the 60s that “Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role” [33] still seems relevant today. Indeed, 32% of Brits think our empire is something to be proud of, one of the highest among the imperial nations polled. [34] We built our identities, values, and economy on a world where we could exploit the resources and people of other nations. When that rotten edifice crumbled to the ground we were lost. [35] Britain needs to define itself by a new future, not with celebrations of our morally clouded past. 

Orwell suggested, “England is outside of European culture.” [36] And even before Brexit, many in Britain were ambivalent at the idea of other countries influencing us. [37] Our politicians’ reluctance to integrate further into Europe and constant badmouthing of “European bureaucrats” [38] shockingly led to us being sidelined! [39] This first cycle of self-harm completed, rather than admitting that our jingoism and old-fashioned mindset had created needless damage and seeking to repair it, Britain doubled down. In the EU referendum, we were told “We don’t need the EU anyway.” [40] All that was needed to miraculously rescue the country was to “Believe in Britain,” [41] and “Bring back the Blitz Spirit!” [42] If only life were that easy. Pulling yourself out of the world’s largest common market may have felt like the shock therapy Britain needed, but according to the impartial public body, the Office for Budget Responsibility, Brexit has harmed Britain’s trade and industries. [43] 

So what of our future? Orwell struck a note of optimism in concluding, ”The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do.” His optimism seemed to be warranted after the war. In his final years, Orwell witnessed the creation of the NHS and the Welfare State. There was hope that a more peaceful, fairer Britain would emerge from the ashes of the war. Orwell passed away in 1950 before the full flourishing of these ideals. 

Never mind, after Thatcherism and austerity, our welfare state has been well and truly shaken up. Let’s hope Orwell has enough space to turn in his grave. 

In 2024 we have a country where young people can’t get housing, [44] poverty is rising, [45] and our NHS is on the verge of collapse. [46] 

So Orwell’s final lines in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” still seem apt, “We must add to our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater or grow less, we must go forward or backwards.” [47] 

It’s time to challenge a political class that tells us that austerity is necessary, that cutting immigration is the key to solving our problems. There’s a generation of young people who want to change things for the better, to have a country to be proud of. We have to keep believing that’s possible. 

[1] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London, Secker and Warburg:1941)

[2] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius ( London, Secker and Warburg:1941) 

[3] Radio Times Awards Issue Radio Times,10-16th February 2024, pg7 

[4] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London, Secker and Warburg:1941) 

[5] See Appendix

[6] M. Sweeney, The Guardian, John Lewis boss calls for royal commission to save UK high streets | Wilko | The Guardian Acessed 11th September 2023 

[7] See Apendix 

[8] R.cook, The Guardian, Robin Cook’s chicken tikka masala speech | Race | The Guardian Acessed 9th November 2023 

[9] The Spice Odyssey Chicken Tikka Masala | Britain’s National Dish | Butter Chicken | Murgh Makhani — The Spice Odyssey Acessed March 3rd 2024 

[10] M.Syed,The Times Migration is being used to enfeeble us, so it’s clear what we have to do (thetimes.co.uk) Acessed March 3rd 2024 

[11] P. Ullman, The Telegraph Immigration is destroying the British economy (telegraph.co.uk) Acessed March 3rd 2024

[12] The Statistics PortalGeographical distribution of immigrants – Statistics Portal – Luxembourg (public.lu) Acessed March 3rd 2024 

[13] The World Bank GDP per capita, PPP (current international $) – Luxembourg | Data (worldbank.org) Accessed 4th march 2024 

[14] The World Bank GDP per capita (current US$) – United Kingdom | Data (worldbank.org) Accessed 4th March 2024 

[15] C. Dustmann, T. FrattiniThe Fiscal Effects of Immigration to the UK | UCL Department of Economics – UCL – University College London Accessed 4th March 2024 

[16] Yougov Do Brits think that immigration has been too high or low in the last 10 years? (yougov.co.uk) Acessed 5th March 2024 

[17] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius ( London, Secker and Warburg:1941) 

[18] M. Goodwin, O. Heath, Joseph Rowntree FoundationBrexit vote explained: poverty, low skills and lack of opportunities | Joseph Rowntree Foundation (jrf.org.uk) Date accessed 21st April 2024

[19] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London, Secker and Warburg:1941) 

[20] R. Neate, The Guardian‘Extra level of power’: billionaires who have bought up the media | The super-rich | The Guardian accessed 5th April 2024

[21] R. Merrick, The Independent Conservatives branded ‘party of billionaires’ as one-third of UK’s richest people donate to Tories | The Independent | The Independent accessed 5th April 2024

[22] K. Farnsworth, Z. Irving, London School of Economics Austerity politics, global neoliberalism, and the official discourse within the IMF | British Politics and Policy at LSE accessed 5th April 2024

[23] C. Grant, English HeritageThe Story of Windrush | English Heritage (english-heritage.org.uk) accessed 5th April 2024 

[24] The Palgrave Handbook of South–South Migration and Inequality, Palgrave MacMillian The Enduring Impacts of Slavery: A Historical Perspective on South–South Migration | SpringerLink accessed 5th April 2024 

[25] M. Greenwood, Manchester University Global Social Challenges | The Impact of the Past: How British Colonialism Affects the Modern World (manchester.ac.uk) accessed 5th April 2024

[26] Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Quoted in Empireland by S. Sanghera, (Penguin, London, 2021)

[27] The Migration Museum Migration MuseumThe last great exodus from Britain? – Migration Museum accessed 5th April 2024 

[28] C.H FeinsteinNational Income, Expenditure and Output of the United Kingdom. 1855-1955. Studies in the National Income and Expenditure of the United Kingdom, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972) 

[29] Full Fact What’s happened to migration since 2010? – Full Fact accessed 5th April 2024 

[30] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London, Secker and Warburg:1941)

[31] T. Janoski, British and French political institutions and the patterning of decolonization British and French political institutions and the patterning of decolonization (Chapter 11) – The Comparative Political Economy of the Welfare State (cambridge.org) Date Acessed 11th April 2024

[32] D. Axe, Reuters Commentary: What the U.S. should learn from Britain’s dying navy | Reuters Date Acessed 11th April 2024 

[33] R. Deliperi, Dean Acheson’s Observation of Great Britain in 1962 Dean Acheson’s Observation of Great Britain in 1962 (e-ir.info) Date Acessed 11th April 2024 

[34] M. Smith, Yougov How unique are British attitudes to empire? | YouGov accessed 1st May 2024 

[35] Paul Beaumont Brexit, Retrotopia and the perils of post-colonial delusions, Global Affairs, 2017

[36] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London, Secker and Warburg:1941) 

[37] M. Skey, London School of EconomicsBritish attitudes towards Europe are being shaped by new ways of thinking about identity and place | British Politics and Policy at LSE acessed 1st May 2024

[38] British Euroscepticism as British Exceptionalism on JSTOR 

[39] I, NGUYêN-DUY, Sovereignty and Europe – The British Perspective » L’Europe en Formation, 2012, issue 2 

[40] D.Bertheksen, The Critic Britain is better off outside the Single Market | Derrick Berthelsen | The Critic Magazine accessed 1st May 2024 

[41] S.Sweeney, Brexit Institute Believe in Britain: The Simple Message that Won Brexit Still Works Wonders for Boris Johnson – Brexit Institute (dcubrexitinstitute.eu) date acessed 3th April 2024

[42] Channel 4-Youtube (2336) Brexit Blitz spirit: Why does it always come back to the war? – YouTube date acessed 3th April 2024 

[43] Office for Budget Responsibility Brexit analysis – Office for Budget Responsibility (obr.uk) 

[44] DePaul Depaul UK – Generation rent: Young people and the housing crisis date accessed 11th April 2024

[45] Joseph Rowntree Foundation UK Poverty 2024: The essential guide to understanding poverty in the UK | Joseph Rowntree Foundation (jrf.org.uk) Date Acessed 23rd January 2024

[46] National Centre for Social Research Public attitudes to the NHS and social care | National Centre for Social Research (natcen.ac.uk) Accessed 27 March 2024 

[47] G. Orwell The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London, Secker and Warburg:1941) 

Appendix- additional sources consulted 

Immigration is destroying the British economy (telegraph.co.uk)

UK economy is addicted to immigration but there is long-term treatment | Larry Elliott | The Guardian

White British school children ‘could be a minority within 40 years’, study claims | Daily Mail Online

Dave Vetter on X: “The Sunday Times today published in its opinion pages what appears to be a variant of Great Replacement theory, the conspiracist fantasy that lies at the heart of several extreme right-wing ideologies🧵 https://t.co/CCzmSaYnmm” / X

Mo Farah’s experience highlights need for safe routes for all asylum seekers (bestforbritain.org)

Stir-fry now Britain’s most popular foreign dish – Mirror Online

About — Very British Problems

What other lobbying scandals have there been in British politics? | Lobbying | The Guardian

“The story was gripping, rich with vivid imagery and emotional depth. I loved how the writer communicated the idea of home as a mother’s arms. There were powerful lines, such as, “Why should I live in a place where young souls don’t live life, but fight for it? Where hearing police sirens is no different from hearing the ice cream van?” These lines packed a punch and left a strong impression.” John Bernard, Coventry Poet Laureate, spoken word performer and Orwell Youth Prize 2024 judge

It’s funny, isn’t it? How life works out. One minute, you’re writing the next chapter of your  story; the intent of remaining untold when really, it’s a story made for both the brave and the bold. The  next, you’re sitting down having ice cream with the one who could be ‘the one’. It’s funny how  life just sort of…switches-up like that. After all, I still remember the day my life switched. The day I escaped from the Devil’s playground.  

I remember it was cold. Colder than cold. The sharp breeze pierced my spine, which for a  second, I mistook for one of the blades held tight by the hooded bloodhounds that stalked me that night. I remember the rain washing away the deep maroon ink that came gushing from the rigid  gashes formed on my knuckles. So thick, so rich, so pure it would surely satisfy his sweet tooth.  Ink travelled down my hand, down my finger, all the way down to the damp pavement, leaving a  trail of horror upon my clumsy footsteps. A path only he can walk – a twisted game of  hopscotch, where each jump could lead to my final moments.  

I legged it down the alleys and roads only known by locals, past playgrounds and churches,  housing both the tough and the feeble, where children write stories of cats that wear hats, and  grown men who can fly, and avoid tales like Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Tales full of broken souls – too lost in their own wonderland of guns and roses, leaving them no room for ‘happy ever after’. 

Eventually, my steps began to soften, as my heart steadied, tucking the phone deeper into my  pocket, to be sure it hadn’t fallen in my frantic escape. Confident I was no longer in sight of the  hooded hounds, I pulled out the jewel they had all set out for. Holding it tight, fragments of  myself still came pouring out, seeing her name. Mum. Calmed and collected at the familiar sight of the screen’s bold lettering, I could feel her warm embrace. I steadied myself to tell her of the  night’s events, but as I turned the corner of another alley, I saw something unexpected. A bed of  flowers lay neatly beneath a dimly-lit post. Like the scatter of maroon on my hand, these too  were rich and pure, as if He himself had sent them down from grace. Gut instinct urged me to  walk on, but curiosity struck. Sliding the phone back into my pocket, I slowed until I stood  parallel with the bed. In the middle lay a small card with a polaroid attached, of a young boy no  older than me, jet black hair and a smile which could make even Frosty melt. Written above in  thick ink: ‘RIP Ben’.  

This wasn’t a gift from grace, nor a symbol of comfort, but a reminder of both the cruelty of His  work and of this cesspool we call home. And that’s when it hit me. Why should I live in a place  where young souls don’t live life, but fight for it? Where hearing police sirens is no different to  hearing the ice cream van? Where we build skyscrapers taller than the giants which live in the  

sky, yet we still have people outside begging beneath them? 

Through all the questioning and contemplating, I hadn’t realised my footsteps had taken me to  the bridge. The one across which Dad taught me how to ride my bike. The one where Nan and I  would take morning walks. The one my granddad would tell me stories about; the planes he  would fly during the war like Superman. As a kid, I always wondered what it would be like to be  Superman. To be like my granddad and fly.

Once again, I stopped and looked over the river, flowing with an aggression emphasised by the  dark clouded sky. In a way, it was like looking in a mirror. After all, a halfhearted boy has a life  of halfhearted promises. A halfhearted boy with only half his story done; only half a chance for a  happily ever after. I looked to the sky, gripping the bridge’s side. What would it be like to be free  from fragility? What would it be like to fly? 

Silence. Everything stopped. The stars had broken free from their clouded shells to write me a  new story. A new yellow brick road.  

“Mum? When are we going home?” 

Time cracked; the moment split; there he was. A young boy (much younger than me), pulling  and pleading with his mum to go home. A word I had heard more than my own name, cast aside  and written off, had suddenly made me stop, made everything stop. Letting go of both the  bridge’s side and the collage of pent-up rage within, I walked towards my street. A street which  housed my clumsy footprints, my endless attempts to build my other half, to construct an  acceptable image: a story to be praised rather than avoided.  

Through my reminiscing, I had arrived. Nausea and panic washed over me. Mum. What would  she say seeing her perfect gift bruised, battered and bleeding? I breathed deep, preparing for the  scold. 

There she was, shining. Golden hair flowed gently down her shoulders; her eyes glistened in the  hallway light as she looked over me. It was as if God (the very same creator of the mountains,  the stars and the seas) had looked upon his world, and decided it needed you. Something so  beautifully crafted, it would make Geppetto tear up. I hid my face, hiding my burdensome  shame, but before I could move, her arms wrapped around me. 

“What happened? Are you OK?” 

Breaking, I crumbled into mum’s arms, clenching onto her, not out of desperation or need, nor  sadness or hate, not because of the pain in my knuckles or the blisters on my feet, but because I  finally realised what it meant. 

“Nothing, Mum. Don’t worry. I’m okay. I’m home.”

“A well-executed political piece: excellent stream of consciousness displayed in each tightly packed paragraph, and a crisp ending.” – Delia Jarrett-Macauley, novelist, academic and broadcaster, and Chair of the OYP judges 2023

Scroll to the end of the page to read and listen to a conversation between Amelia and 2021 winner, Anya Poerscout-Edgerton.

Five minutes.

Five minutes to wait. Five minutes of dread. That’s what awaits you. Five minutes silently praying that only one red slash appears. Five minutes in which you decide you can no longer sit motionless on the toilet seat, waiting, dreading, praying. Five minutes in which you get up, leave your room 101 and grab  your phone, cradling it close because any comfort is better than none. Cradling it like you’d cradle a baby, just like you might have to if the white window of the plastic stick is smeared with two red strokes of blood. Like the blood spilled on the battlefields in the latest day of this cruel, constant war  against humanity.

Four minutes.

Four minutes in which you open the news, already anticipating the horrors. Four minutes where you see the yellow and blue flag dragged through the dirt by the criminals who claim to want peace. Four minutes where you read about the people who are doing this for absolutely no reason except their  own selfishness and pride. Pride that spurs these monsters to massacre innocent people, no more  than numbers to the cowards that call themselves leaders. Leaders who commit atrocities others gasp  at, yet do nothing to protect the future generations from having to witness them. Future generations  who don’t get a choice, being born into this endless cycle of misery. Misery we are taught we deserve. But other people bomb civilians mercilessly despite them not being at any fault in the causation of this war. Not a “special military operation”, a war where innocent masses are just pawns to manipulate  leaders to make the coward’s moves.

Three minutes.

Three minutes where you become wiser about thousands of spectators starving in Africa, fleeing their  seats from the encroaching desert, sprinting closer, dragging everything it can under with it and  instead of weaving through obstacles he sprints straight through them. The sea warms up on the  opposing side of the field, threatening to break dreams. When the whistle blows, the two of them will  fight for territory, each wanting more than either should have, pressing forward relentlessly. Both  want to win, to be victorious, to have the right to rule over the other. The rainforest stands on the  sidelines, watching morosely. She should cheer, she should encourage them to fight but her green  pom-poms dangle uselessly from her sides, brown sleeves pulled down to hide the vine like scars that  snake across her arms. The scars run deep and the ones creating them don’t realise that with her  silence they’ve bought their own destruction and signed the contract. They barely look at the contracts  they sign, their names on her death warrant. The death warrant so many know of and yet push her  towards the gallows themselves. After the game, orphans dig through litter bins desperately seeking  food even if it’s just a crumb of popcorn to sustain them another day. These children who shouldn’t have to provide for themselves.

Two minutes.

Two minutes in which you read how youth suicide rates have increased dramatically. Children who  haven’t had their chance to make positive impacts on the world, to teach others to be better, to not make the same mistakes that have led us to this avalanche of depression, ending their existences because they can’t cope anymore. They murder themselves with knives, with alcohol, with drugs, the  things they shouldn’t have access to and yet use to take away the pain, anything to get that clarity,  that swooping high that is wrongly given in the form of pills, drink and blades. Why are children feeling so desperate that they want to die? And why is society shunning them if they have scars on their bodies or a constant smell of alcohol or constant mood changes from withdrawal. Why are parents doing nothing, feeling disappointed they’ve been saddled with these burdens they forget they created and were supposed to have nurtured, cared for, rocked through tears. The children whose parents should have waited at the school gates, held them quietly after a nightmare, cried for them at  graduations, fed them, clothed them, loved them. The children who are shouted at, blamed, locked  away, manipulated into believing they are unworthy of love or time. The children who are hit,  abandoned, starved, forced to endure the torment they didn’t ask for and do not deserve.

One minute.

One minute in which you contemplate why anyone would want to bring a child into this world anyway. Why have a child if it will only be put through all the torture that the universe has to offer? Allowing the child’s soul to go and be at peace before it has to face these horrors would be so much kinder, so much less painful for both of you. The baby you will be forced to carry for nine long months of suffering because five judges, all of whom aren’t part of the generation of fighters, of protesters, of people who want their rights, made you the criminal if you decide that you don’t want to raise a child in this godawful world. Five judges, four of whom are men, who never have to worry about pregnancy, who have never had to wonder if one wrong move could ruin their lives, who have never had to clutch keys between their knuckles and hurry past catcalling drunks propped up in alleyways, no one to hear you  scream if the worst happened. The men who are allowed to make decisions for millions of women despite never having felt the relief at the sight of blood on a sanitary towel – the knowledge that you won’t have to worry about a child in this cruel world is the greatest relief in the universe. The woman who agreed with them because of the age old ideals people are blinded with. The ideals that people  will have to fight to change and unlearn.

Zero minutes.

Five judges and two lives.

Five minutes and two lines.

We asked previous winners and runners up of the Orwell Youth Prize to interview the 2023 cohort about their Orwell Youth Prize writing. Below, we have both an audio recording and transcript of 2021 winner, Anya Poerscout-Edgerton, in conversation with 2023 winner, Amelia Roles. They discuss form and structure, stripping back their writing, the importance of humour, their writing ambitions, and top tips for future Youth Prize entrants!

TABBY: Hello, I’m Tabby Hayward, I’m the Programme Coordinator for the Orwell Youth Prize, and I’m here today with Amelia and Anya, who are two of the past winners of the prize, and are now part of our Orwell Youth Fellows Programme. They’ll tell you a bit more about that in a moment. But the Prize is currently open for entries on the theme of Home. And we welcome writing in all forms, from stories and poems to articles, essays, scripts, and more, and from students in secondary school, years 7 to 13 throughout the UK. Now, without further ado, I’m going to hand over to Anya and then Amelia to introduce themselves and to talk a bit about their writing.

ANYA: Hi I’m Anya, I won the prize in 2021 with a short screenplay. Now I’m 18, I’m a gap year student, and I’m excited to talk to Amelia about her piece. It’s really good.

AMELIA: Hi, I’m Amelia, I won the prize in 2023. I’m 14 and I wrote a short story about the Roe versus Wade abolishing in America.

ANYA: My first question was, apart from your winning piece, which is really good, I was reading it the other day, it’s really moving, quite tense – what would you get everyone in the world to read, if you could, and why?

AMELIA: Oh, that’s hard! I don’t think it’s a certain thing I’d get everyone in the world to read – I would certainly encourage people to read more and discover kind of their favourite genre or text to read, because I really don’t think we do enough of that. So I think if people read more, they’d probably be better informed. And that would help the world in a lot of ways.

ANYA: I’ve mentioned this before in meetings, I really like the novel Push by Sapphire. It really –  I read it when I was about 16, and I think it really opened my eyes to a kind of diversity of experience. And obviously, it’s like one quite specific experience, it’s about a black girl growing up in an abusive household in New York. And there’s a lot of poverty, and a lot of hardship. But she kind of finds her voice through writing. But yeah, that really kind of affected me when I was 16 and made me who I am today. So yeah, I think that would be my answer.

AMELIA: So I read the piece that you’ve got on the Orwell website. And I thought it was really interesting the way you wrote it like a screenplay. Because obviously, I’ve only ever written short stories, I can’t do poetry or anything like that. So is that like your writing style for everything? Or is it the way you just chose to write that particular piece?

ANYA: That was actually the first time I’d ever written a screenplay. I remember, I watched loads of YouTube videos and taught myself. And I think it was because, I wrote a lot of short stories before that when I was younger, and I often found that I didn’t have very good economy of language, I would kind of write a lot of things just for the sake of them because they sounded nice, and like I was good at using words. And I felt that a screenplay is a really good exercise in economy of language, and like kind of taking it right back to like, what does the audience need to know? So yeah, I kind of enjoyed that, that’s how I came to it.

AMELIA: Stripping it back is really hard to accomplish. But I think you did a good job.

ANYA: Well because your piece is quite – that’s what really struck me about it is, I mean, there was a narrative of sorts, but it was really stripped back to like, quite intense, concentrated pieces of prose, which is really kind of effective in the way that you – obviously you have to read the piece, Orwell Foundation website, please read the piece! – but like it’s really stripped back and condensed. It’s like, like, you know those little ginger shorts you get. Like that.

AMELIA: I think that I was kind of just rambling for a lot of it. And I guess that worked out in favour! But it was kind of just a very angry rant, if anything,

ANYA: Well often that’s the best writing, I think, when you just like open the Notes app on my computer, I just start like, grrrrr, really angry about something! And then, anyways, what drew you to writing in such an expressive non-traditional prose form, as opposed to more traditional narrative or academic nonfiction that we learn at school?

AMELIA: I think it was just like I say, a very angry rant. And I kind of think I took the problems – because I wrote about climate change, the impact that parents have on their children – and I kind of just took all the problems in the world and constructed my own little rant about each of them and then kind of sectioned it. I think that’s the way I went about it.

ANYA: Organised ranting.

AMELIA: Yeah!

ANYA: It worked out really well! It’s amazing.

AMELIA: How did you kind of develop – because I listened to your podcast, and then I read the piece on the Orwell website. And I thought it was – you’ve got a great sense of humor in your writing! So how did you kind of develop that? Or is it just like your internal monologue?

ANYA: Often I’m quite funny, because I’m quite scared, because I’m really scared of people thinking that I’m too pretentious or that I’m taking myself too seriously. Maybe that’s to do with being a woman or something, I don’t know! So often, I feel like I have to laugh at stuff. But also, because I think that laughing can be really powerful, and like deconstructing – oh, now I sound pretentious! –  deconstructing, like absurdities in everyday life. I think it’s really good for that. And because it kind of takes you, kind of you realise you’re laughing, and then you kind of get this almost distance from, I don’t know, from yourself, where you’re like, ‘Oh, that is really weird’. And then that’s where thought begins. I don’t know!

AMELIA: I think also laughing is very therapeutic, for a lot of people. If you’ve had a really bad day, and you just kind of sit down and do something you find that’s actually funny, I think that can help in a lot of ways. So I think you really inspired me maybe to try and write something a bit more humorous, rather than just sadness, anger, all the angst, kind of thing!

ANYA: But also don’t be afraid to be angsty, I think because, you know, like, you get the ‘Cheer up love might never happen’. Because you get told, ‘Don’t be angry about this stuff, don’t be sad about this stuff’. But you can! You definitely can – you should.

AMELIA: Do you see yourself kind of taking on the path of writing in the future? Or do you think you would move to kind of a podcast and screenplay genre?

ANYA: That’s literally my exact question except adapted for you! So I think you can see, can you see this? No? I, well, I’m hopefully going to go and study a science degree at university. So I kind of don’t – it’s not my plan for my career. But yeah, I just try to write what makes me happy, write what I’m interested in. Fill up my hard drive with just random, like half essays of something that I thought when I got home from work! Screenplays – I’m trying to move away from them, a little bit, because I think I’m getting back into liking language and kind of, I want to learn how to apply the same economy of language to prose again, and then how to write prose again, because I think also prose is more maybe useful in everyday life. But I don’t know, I just go with the flow, baby!

AMELIA: I think that’s really kind of the whole reason people write, because it makes you happy. Like, there are a lot of writers out there who – you can tell when they’re writing because they want to and when they’re writing because they’ve got a deadline to adhere to, and they just have to crank something out. Or else they won’t money. I think, with those sorts of pieces, there’s no point doing it if it’s not going to be enjoyable, or it’s not going to make you feel better about your own opinion.

ANYA: I saw in your little Youth Fellows bio, that you said you want to be a journalist?

AMELIA: Yeah.

ANYA: Is that still the case? If so, have you got like a specific area of journalism in mind?

AMELIA: I’m not sure really. Because I did get asked – we  had like a mock interview kind of set up at school. And they were like, ‘What do you kind of see yourself doing in the future?’ And I said I wanted to do journalism, and it was an English teacher who was interviewing me. And she said, ‘That’s very odd, because you wrote fictional narrative, but you want to do nonfiction journalism’. And I don’t think it has to be completely specific that it’s nonfiction, kind of, if you have fictional stories that get a point across and then you can link that in. I think that’s kind of something I’d like to have a look at doing, and see where the writing takes me.

ANYA: That’s a nice little end – I think?

TABBY: Yeah, brilliant, great work, guys. Can I just ask you both to say, one piece of advice for anyone considering entering the Orwell Youth Prize this year?

AMELIA: Make sure that the subject you write about isn’t something you’ve been forced into writing about, because it’s just not going to be the same. Because I remember there were a lot of people who entered it at the same time as me. And I could tell they didn’t really care about what they were writing about. Whereas I cared about what I was writing about. I think that’s what makes the difference between a very monotone piece of writing and a piece of writing where you can tell the person’s obviously deeply invested in the subject matter.

ANYA: My advice, I think my advice is almost like to younger me entering the prize, which sounds so gross, but still! Don’t be afraid of being pretentious, I think, because people like you can definitely do writing and having opinions, whether that’s because you’re female or whatever else. And also, I think that people who are pretentious are usually people who are ungenuine, so if you’re genuine, and you really care about a thing and are passionate about a thing, and you really want to write about it, I don’t think there’s really that much of a risk of being pretentious. Just go for it. Go for it. Just do it.

Amelia Roles is a junior winner of The Orwell Youth Prize 2023

From chilling, richly imagined dystopias to essays on meritocracy and colonial borders, we are delighted to announce the winners of The Orwell Youth Prize 2023, on the theme of ‘Who’s in Control?’.

All of this year’s winning entries – including runners up and highly commended, in senior and junior categories – are available to read now via the links below.

The Orwell Youth Prize 2023: Who’s in Control?

At a time when so many issues affecting young people, from education to the cost of living, feel out of control, and when it can be hard to know who or what to believe, we asked our entrants to think and write creatively about the theme ‘Who’s in Control?’.

Over 500 young writers responded in the form of essays, poetry, short fiction, journalism, and video game designs. The standard was once again incredibly high, so much so that our selectors chose forty-three outstanding pieces to go forward to the judges.

The judges of The Orwell Youth Prize 2023 were Orwell Prize-winning author, Delia Jarrett-Macauley; Financial Times Global Education Editor, Andrew Jack; the BBC’s Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent, Marianna Spring; and Forward Prize-winning poet, Will Harris. Chair of Judges, Delia Jarrett-Macauley, said:

We thoroughly enjoyed reading this year’s submissions for the OYP and were impressed by the range of unusual stories, poems, essays and scripts tackling the theme ‘Who’s in Control’. It was rewarding to discover so many well-executed pieces, and we were impressed by your creativity and original ideas. Keep writing! And congratulations to all.

Our volunteer readers also delivered over 400 pieces of feedback, ensuring that every entrant who requested it had a personal response to their work and the benefit of writing advice and inspiration from our network of professional writers, academics and publishing professionals.

The winners and runners up will also be invited to join The Orwell Youth Fellows, a collective of young writers starting conversations and developing new writing that is responsive to our changing world – and supporting other young people to engage with the prize.

The Orwell Youth Prize Celebration Day  2023

All the shortlisted writers were invited to the Celebration Day at University College London on Saturday 8th July 2023, where they took part in a creative writing workshop with the award-winning writer and poet Anthony Anaxagorou and shared their work before receiving their prizes, including a copy of George Orwell’s essays and The Orwell Youth Fellow’s Zine, Axial Tilt. Thank you to everyone who entered and congratulations to all our winners!

JUNIOR WINNERS

Beth Anker – Meritocracy: The Politician’s Pipe Dream

Priya Floura – Tick Tock

Heike Ghandi – The Catharsis of a Crane

Amelia Roles – Misconception

JUNIOR RUNNERS UP

Edward Blair-Heikkinen – Simulation 0413

Ruxue Jia – Why is it so dark?

Ellie Lee – An Uncontrollable Scribble

Marianne Lee – Obedience

SENIOR WINNERS

Zaeema Assad – The Radcliffe Line

Iris Mamier – Beware of the dog!’ says the man with the gun

Lara Wong – Men’s Shoes

SENIOR RUNNERS UP

Heather Chapman – Tableau with Sea Breeze and Salt Crown

Ewan Guarnieri – A Grand Reveal

Rosetta Millar – The Collective

HIGHLY COMMENDED

Zirui Peng – To The Northerner (Junior)

Catie May McAleese – Thy Will Be Done (Senior)

The Orwell Youth Prize 2023 shortlisted writers, selected by our volunteer readers, were:

Amaia Blades-Darwen; Amelia Roles; Annabel Ovonlen; Anouk Wood; Beth Anker; Catherine McMullan; Catie May McAleese; Chelsea Xu; Doobee Adura; Edward Blair-Heikkinen; Ellie Lee; Ethan McMillan; Ewan Guarnieri; Francis McCabe; Haneen Eldegail; Hau Tak Ng; Heather Chapman; Heike Ghandi; Imogen Oliver; Imogen Watts; Iris Mamier; Isabella Tait; Jasmine Lai Man Chun; Lara Wong; Lauren Slater; Marianne Lee; Narthana Jayaweerasingham, Nikita Kurgan; Nia Hopes; Oliver Lewis; Pip van Toorn; Priya Floura; Pun Wattanasiritham; Rebekah Wilson; Rosetta Millar; Ruby Campbell; Ruxue Jia; Sebastian Sexton; Selina Zheng; Semilore Kaji-Hausa; Treasure Stephen; Vanessa Deko; Zaeema Assad; Zirui Peng.

We asked four professional writers to create resources to help guide entrants through the process of researching, finding a form, starting to write and responding to feedback on an entry to the Orwell Youth Prize.

Who am I? (part 1)

I’ve always done lots of writing of different kinds, though what I’ve ended up doing most is poems. I started writing poetry in my mid-teens because I didn’t know anyone else who was doing it. Also, I couldn’t play any instruments and I’d read somewhere that poems were like song lyrics without the music.

Since then, alongside writing poems (and working), I’ve written book reviews and essays. They access different parts of my brain: a poem can be justified by sound or feeling; an essay will be judged on its argument. But I like going between them. When I get frustrated with a poem, I can walk next door (in my brain) and write an essay. In doing that, something might get dislodged in the poem.

The first book I published was a short non-fiction book (or long essay) called Mixed-Race Superman, which circled around race, heroism, masculinity, and the limits of speech to affect political change. It came about by chance – as in, I wasn’t planning to write it – but its form emerged from the process of writing; it almost made the writing of it necessary.

What is form?

It makes sense to look for analogies in other art forms (that word again): in music, for example, form might be the rhythm or time signature of a piece; in art, form might refer to the lines and shapes an artist draws on the page before adding colour and shade.

Form could, in musical terms, be described as the rhythm animating a piece of writing – the flow that makes the words sound good (‘right’) and keeps the reader’s eye moving down the page.

In painterly terms, it could be the shape of a piece of writing, whether short/long sentences and paragraphs, lots of punctuation, or (in the case of poems) lines, stanzas, even particular shapes into which the text has been fitted.

The most famous example of shape-based writing – also known as concrete poetry – probably comes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where Alice imagines a mouse telling a tale shaped like a mouse’s tail and we see the text curl down the page in that very shape, a perfect fusion of form and…

…she kept on puzzling about it while the Mouse was speaking, so that her idea of the tale was something like this –

Form and…?

Form on its own doesn’t make much sense (or about as much sense as sense does without sound). Form exists as one half of a duo. As day conjures night, form brings up the shadow of content.

But what is content? Content is usually synonymous with subject matter. Your content might be – on any given day – the taste of Lilt, the government’s reliance on foodbanks, the life cycle of the eel. Form is how this subject comes to appear on the page.

Content is the dough, and form is the kitchen appliance that turns it into spaghetti. But that doesn’t quite capture it. Because dough is itself an already carefully mixed and kneaded ‘form’. Form and content, likewise, are an inseparable yin-and-yang duo; you can’t think of one without the other.

Examples?

Let’s take two examples which might, like the mouse’s tale, be called perfect unions of form and content.

1. In the 1730s, Alexander Pope wrote this two-line poem (a couplet) and had it engraved on the collar of a dog which he gave to the Prince of Wales:

I am his highness’s dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

2. The German poet Christian Morgenstern wrote this poem well over a century ago, whose title translates as ‘Fish’s Night Song’:

But do you agree that these two poems are especially pleasing combinations of form and content? If so, why? And if not, how could you do it better?

A challenge:

Write your own example of form and content perfectly combined. It could be a text to be written on the side of a helicopter, tattooed on the chest of a famous actor, or inscribed on a single sheaf of grass. Let your imagination wander.

Forms around us

In her preface to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley writes that ‘invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.’ Chaos might be another name for content without form.

We can’t help but impose forms on the world, thinking ‘tree’ or ‘that feels like cotton’ or ‘that dog looks happy’. Invention in writing isn’t so different. It begins with the same heightened awareness of form, of the forms already around us.

In this mood of heightened awareness, the premonition of form meets us everywhere: in the pattern of bubbles in a soft drink, in crowds flowing out of the station, in clouds. We can’t avoid it.

And maybe the point of writing, as Mary Shelley argues, isn’t to invent something out of nothing; it’s to recreate that feeling when several chaotic wisps of cloud briefly combine to form the shape of a happy dog.

Who am I? (part 2)

Writing is often reduced to its content or subject matter. It’ll always be about something (a kidnapped dog in Alaska, a star-crossed couple in Italy, etc.).

But much of the time writing starts with something harder to pin down: the search for a form. This might be no more than a rhythm or a shape on the page. Form doesn’t hold content like a shell contains a nut. Form, like a satellite dish, allows us to reach those dark and faraway places we wouldn’t know existed otherwise.

A challenge:

I want you to think about how you would answer the question ‘Who am I?’ Try to follow the intuition of form. For example, what you write could take the form of a pair of trainers, an astrological chart, or a series of instructions (to get somewhere or make a dish). Whatever the case, let the rhythm and line carry the form and take you somewhere unexpected.

BONUS ACTIVITY! Sleepy time with James Joyce 

The Irish writer James Joyce was someone for whom form was the whole point of writing. From the late 1920s to the end of the 1930s – the last decade of his life – he wrestled with a book in which, as his friend Samuel Beckett put it, ‘form is content, content is form.’ Beckett would go on to say: ‘His writing is not about something; it is that something itself… When the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep…’

But what do sleeping words look like? This is Joyce’s attempt to write in a language that doesn’t describe sleep but feels sleepy, from Finnegans Wake (1939):

Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm.

What makes these words sleepy? The way the sentences trail off, the preponderance of sound over sense, the warped allusion to nursery rhyme, song or proverb?

A challenge:

Fill a page with a piece of writing in which ‘the sense is sleep, the words go to sleep.’ Be as imaginative with the page as you can. Draw on anything that makes you think of sleep and think about how to make the words themselves feel sleepy.

Thank you for reading this resource. We hope you enjoyed it and that it comes in useful as you write your entry to the Orwell Youth Prize! If you have any feedback on our resources, please email info@orwellfoundation.com.

Will Harris is a London-based writer. His debut poetry book RENDANG (2020) was a Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His second book of poems, Brother Poem, was published by Granta in the UK and by Wesleyan in the US in March 2023.

The commission of these resources was supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England as part of the Orwell Foundation’s Regional Hubs project.