Friday 13 January 2012
The Orwell Prize 2012 closes for entries next Wednesday, 18th January. There’s still time to enter the Book Prize, Journalism Prize and Blog Prize – full details can be found in our ‘How to Enter’ section. And please spread the news widely – the more entries, the merrier! Best of luck. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS ON ANIMAL FARM We’re privileged to be able to give you an exclusive extract of an introduction to Animal Farm by the late Christopher Hitchens. Thanks to publishers Harvill Secker, you can – for a limited time – read Christopher’s thoughts on the publication, and the afterlife, of Orwell’s classic, on our website. NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR AT FOYLES The Foyles Café at Foyles Bookshop, Charing Cross Road is currently exhibiting some of Aleks Krotoski’s photographs inspired by Nineteen Eighty-Four. Aleks spent just over a year telling the first 369 words of the novel, one word at a time, in photographs. You can see the full set of images on her Flickr stream, and you can buy some of the images via her online store. More on the novel on our site. And more news on the exhibition soon… FROM THE ARCHIVE Down and Out in Paris and London was first published on 9th January 1933. You can find the first chapter on our website, along with related essays such as his letter to friend Steven Runciman about his first tramping experience, aged 17; ‘A Day in the Life of a Tramp’ and ‘Beggars in London’ (the latter first published on 12th January 1929); ‘The Spike’, a 1931 essay which formed the basis of two chapters in the book; Orwell’s essay on ‘Hop-Picking’, and our blog of his hop-picking diary; a 1933 poem by Orwell, ‘A dressed man and a naked man’; Gordon Bowker’s essay on ‘Orwell’s London’; and, for the BBC, Emma Jane Kirby’s ‘On the trail of George Orwell’s outcasts’. Orwell’s ‘Pleasure Spots’ (11th January 1946) and ‘A Nice Cup of Tea’ (12th January 1946) also celebrated publication anniversaries this week, and while we don’t have Orwell’s ‘Pamphlet Literature’ (9th January 1943), we do have two pamphlets of his in our archive: ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ and ‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’ (which also featured in Ferdy Mount’s 2010 Orwell Lecture). FROM ELSEWHERE
- Brian Cathcart’s 1997 essay for Granta magazine, which provided the basis of his Orwell Prize-winning The Case of Stephen Lawrence, is now available on the Granta website…
- …and Brian also wrote for The Independent about Stephen Lawrence, and for the Financial Times about lessons from the trial on unbiased juries
- John Campbell, previously shortlisted for part of his biography of Margaret Thatcher, wrote for Prospect about ‘The Iron Lady’
- Sir Bernard Crick, Orwell biographer and founder of the Orwell Prize, is the subject of one of the new biographies in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
- Anatol Lieven, winner of the very first Orwell Prize for Books, selected five books on Pakistan for The Browser
- Christopher de Bellaigue, previously shortlisted for Rebel Land, talks about his new book, The Patriot of Persia, on 14th February in London…
- …while Anna Chen, previously shortlisted for her Madam Miaow blog, presents an evening of satire on the Opium Wars at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, on 16th February
- And Orwell Prize for Journalism winner, Jenni Russell, has been shortlisted for The Omnivore’s ‘Hatchet Job of the Year’ award, for one of her book reviews
THE WARTIME DIARIES The next entry will be published on 14th March. THE HOP-PICKING DIARIES The final entry was published on 8th October. THE WIGAN PIER DIARIES The final entry was published on 25th March. 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.