Search Results for: events/orwell-lecture-2009-hilary-mantel

We thoroughly enjoyed holding events at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival for the first time – and we hope that, via video, you enjoy them too.

• Orwell’s essay, ‘Hop-picking’, was first published by the New Statesman and Nation on 17 October 1931 – read it on our site
• A production of Burmese Days by aya theatre is to open off-Broadway – discover more by and about Orwell and Burma on our Burmese Days page
• Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending – he wrote about Orwell for the New York Review of Books in 2009
• It was a controversial year for the Booker, with many literary critics debating the merits of the prize and the shortlist – a good time, then, to read Orwell’s ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’
• The T. S. Eliot Prize announced its shortlist – there’s plenty of, and on, Orwell’s poetry on our site (including an extract from Eliot)
• It’s one year since the UK government’s Comprehensive Spending Review, which was the subject of our launch debate last year
• And Norman Bissell will be talking about ‘George Orwell: The Socialist Who Loved Nature’ in Edinburgh on 29 October – Orwell’s ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ and Coming Up for Air are suitable background reading

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We’ve now uploaded the full video of this year’s Orwell Lecture, ‘Orwell and the Oligarchs’, given by Ferdinand Mount. Ferdy – a former Orwell Prize judge (2009), former head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, former editor of the Times Literary Supplement and novelist and author – drew heavily on Orwell’s work on James Burnham, influential political theorist and author of The Managerial Revolution. You can read one of Orwell’s essays on Burnham, ‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’, on our website. Birkbeck College – who have organised the annual lecture in conjunction with the Orwell Trust since the 1980s – have a list of previous Orwell lecturers, while we have video of Hilary Mantel’s 2009 lecture (on Thomas Cromwell) and Andrew O’Hagan’s 2008 lecture (on the English), and a transcript of Michael Rosen’s 2007 lecture (‘Orwell’s contribution to the questions of how we read and what reading is for’).

Entries OPEN

Entries for this year’s Prize are now open. You can download entry forms for the Book and Journalism Prizes, enter the Blog Prize using the online form, and read the rules and regulations and values of the Prize in full in our ‘How to enter’ section. Entries close on 19th January 2011. Books, journalism and blogs published in 2010, and which have a clear relationship with the UK or Ireland, are eligible. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

From the archive

Our friends over at Finlay Publisher have just published an extract from Dominic Cavendish’s excellent lecture, ‘Coming Up for Air revisited – Orwell, England and the idea of escape’. You can watch video of the full lecture, first given at the George Orwell Conference in Lille earlier this year, on our site. Dominic has adapted Coming Up for Air, a scene from 1984 and ‘A Hanging’ and ‘Shooting an Elephant’ for the stage – his thoughts on adapting Orwell are at WhatsOnStage, while actor Alan Cox performs Dominic’s adaptation of one of Orwell’s preparatory works for Burmese Days on our website. Earlier this week, we tweeted a link to Orwell’s review of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, a dystopian novel which influenced Orwell in writing 1984. You can read Orwell’s review, ‘Freedom and Happiness’, in our ‘By Orwell’ section, and you can also read Paul Owen’s Guardian piece on the similarity between the two works (and whether it matters), which is linked from our ‘About Orwell’ section.

The Orwell Diaries

Next week, diary entries will be published on 8th December. Last week, diary entries were published on 28th November and 1st December. If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org or follow us on Twitter. And you can subscribe to this newsletter via email.

This year’s George Orwell Memorial Lecture takes place next Friday, 26th November. Ferdinand Mount – former Orwell Prize judge (2009), former head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, former editor of the Times Literary Supplement and novelist and author – will be speaking on ‘Orwell and the Oligarchs’. The lecture starts at 5pm, and will take place in the Beveridge Hall, Senate House, London. Senate House was one of the inspirations for the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984. To reserve a free place, email events@bbk.ac.uk. Video of the lecture will be available on our YouTube Channel after the event.

Entries Open

Entries for this year’s Prize are now open. You can download entry forms for the Book and Journalism Prizes, enter the Blog Prize using the online form, and read the rules and regulations and values of the Prize in full in our ‘How to enter’ section. Entries close on 19th January 2011. Books, journalism and blogs published in 2010, and which have a clear relationship with the UK or Ireland, are eligible. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Orwell and Russia

We ran a wide-ranging discussion last night on ‘Orwell and Russia’ with our friends at Notting Hill’s famous Travel Bookshop. Journalist and translator, Masha Karp, and journalist John Lloyd discussed Soviet Russia’s influence on Orwell and the influence of Orwell’s work in Russia, touching on Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm (and its proposed preface, ‘The Freedom of the Press’), Nineteen Eighty-Four and much else besides. Video from the event is starting to appear on our website and on our YouTube channel, and the full video will be available by next week’s newsletter. Follow us on Twitter for full updates.

From the archive

This year’s Orwell lecturer, Ferdy Mount, follows in a strong recent tradition. Last year’s lecture was given by Man Booker winner, Hilary Mantel, on the subject of her winning novel, Wolf Hall: Thomas Cromwell. Before that, novelist and writer Andrew O’Hagan lectured on ‘The English’, and we also have a transcript of the 2007 Lecture, when Michael Rosen (then Children’s Laureate) lectured on ‘The Politics of Response: Orwell’s contribution to the questions of how we read and what reading is for’. Ireland’s economic woes have been prominent in the news this week. Over the last few years, we’ve longlisted Roy Foster’s Luck and the Irish which analysed the Celtic Tiger on the way up, and Fintan O’Toole’s Ship of Fools, which covered the way down. A number of our events over the last few years have looked at the global crisis: Dr Patricia Clavin, Will Hutton and Mark Thompson on political crisis and economic crash at Oxford, 2009; Andy Beckett, Lisa Harker and Paul Mason on unemployment and uncertainty in London, summer 2009; and Paul Collier, David Halpern, David Smith and Linda Yueh on ‘the economy – what next?’ at Oxford 2010. This year’s launch debate also considered the consequences of the British Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review.

The Orwell Diaries

Next week, diary entries will be published on 23rd November. Last week, diary entries were published on 16th November. If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), or would like to subscribe to an email version of the newsletter, we’d love to hear from you – email us on gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org or follow us on Twitter.