Friday 05 August 2011
You can now watch video of our debate at the Buxton Festival, ‘is politics corrupted by corrupted language?’, on our website and YouTube channel. The line-up was slightly different from that advertised, with journalists Colette Douglas-Home (columnist, The Herald) and Mark Douglas-Home (former editor, The Herald) joining Linda Grant (Orange Prize-winning and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, books include the recent We Had It So Good) and Matthew Parris (journalist and former MP, winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2005, previously shortlisted for Chance Witness). Dame Janet Smith, High Court judge and chair of the Buxton Festival, presided over the discussion. Nick Cohen (journalist and author, previously shortlisted for What’s Left? and longlisted for Waiting for the Etonians) sadly had to pull out. Video of our previous events at Buxton – Andrea Gillies in conversation with her publisher Rebecca Nicolson, Andrew Brown in conversation with David Blunkett MP, a debate on Orwell vs Dickens, and a discussion on ‘what makes a good political novel?’ – can be found in our events archive.
Johann Hari
You may be aware of allegations made about the winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2008, Johann Hari, which have been investigated by our governing Council of the Orwell Prize. You can read the latest statement on our website.
From the archive
There’s been a lot of discussion about the death penalty this week, with the relaunch of the UK government’s e-petitions website. Orwell wrote about capital punishment in one of his most famous essays, ‘A Hanging’, which you can read on our website. Orwell was quoted in the final edition of the News of the World, which was shut down in response to the phone-hacking scandal. (Nick Davies, who has been leading The Guardian’s investigations into phone-hacking, was longlisted for his Flat Earth News in 2009.) The quote came from Orwell’s ‘Decline of the English Murder’, which is on our website, and you can also read The Observer’s Robert McCrum on the paper’s use of Orwell’s quote. Orwell biographer D. J. Taylor wrote about Orwell’s essay and the NotW for The Independent.
From elsewhere
- Max Dunbar reviews our Buxton Festival event
- Penguin have released an ‘Essential Orwell’ box set
- Congratulations to Orwell biographer and Orwell Trust chair, D. J. Taylor, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his novel Derby Day
- Previous Blog Prize winner, Winston Smith, talks to the Manchester Evening News
- The New Yorker quotes Orwell’s advice (from ‘Politics and the English Language’) in a piece on the art of writing…
- …while Seth Godin edits Orwell’s six points
- ‘Ungood’ makes Guardian Children’s Books’ top ten ‘unwords’ list
- Economist Diane Coyle’s blogpost, ‘George Orwell and e-books’, mentions his ‘Bookshop Memories’ and ‘Books vs Cigarettes’
- Previous winner, Peter Beaumont, has a new book out – Revolution Road: Reflections on the Arab Spring – as part of Vintage Books’ ‘Brain Shots’ series
- One of Orwell’s childhood homes is up for sale
- Longlisted blogger, Steven Baxter, has published his first book, Musings of a Monkey
- BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House updates Down and Out in Paris and London (25.50 in)
- Longlisted blogger, Juliet Jacques, writes about Rayner Heppenstall, Orwell’s flatmate (and producer of BBC radio’s Animal Farm)
- Tim Butcher, longlisted for both Blood River and Chasing the Devil, talks about Graham Greene on BBC Radio 4
- Ian Cobain, longlisted for the Journalism Prize in 2010, had an exclusive on UK torture policy this week – he talked about torture, with Reprieve’s Clare Algar, at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2010
The Wartime Diaries
The next entry will be published on 28th August.
The Wigan Pier Diary
The final entry was published on 25th March. In addition to the blog, we have a Google Map tracking Orwell’s journey, a flickr set of archive images, and our page on The Road to Wigan Pier, with the first chapter and other links. We’ll have some more exciting Orwell diary news soon… If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on gavin.freeguard@mediastandardstrust.org or follow us on Twitter. And you can subscribe to this newsletter via email.