Friday 22 February 2013
Next week The Orwell Prize and Stephen Armstrong (author of The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited) will go to Wigan to run a series of workshops for local teens at Sunshine House Community Centre. The writers going to teach include Rosie Boycott, Meg Rusoff, John Hegley and Paul Anderson. English PEN are supporting us by bring Hegley and running their own freedom of expression workshop. We can’t wait to meet the participants and we’re very grateful to Sunshine House for hosting us and feeding everyone as well as organising the involvement of more than nine schools. The workshops will cover topics from Orwellian writing for 2013 to writing for a living. Our Operations Manager, Katriona Lewis, will run a workshop called, Journalists write the first draft of history. We’ll tell you all about it in the next newsletter and share as much as possible.
New videos
This week we uploaded two sets of videos from Burma to our YouTube channel; Timothy Garton Ash’s Orwell lecture and Aung San Suu Kyi’s conversation with Dr U Thaw Kaung. We’re delighted to be able to share these talks with you and hope you enjoy them. If you want to hear more from us between the newsletters do make sure you’re following us on Twitter and you like us on Facebook where we regularly share finer details of what we’re doing which could be particularly exciting for the upcoming week in Wigan.
The Real George Orwell
The BBC Radio 4 season on Orwell has had us rapt for nearly a month now and it’s still going. If you’ve missed anything or want to listen all over again they’ve been kind enough to leave all the programs live here until the very end of the season.
From the archive
For a taste of Orwell’s Wigan why not read the first chapter of his The Road to Wigan Pier, supplied by our friends at Penguin. And to contextualise this you could also read Stephen Armstrong’s exclusive piece, ‘Treading Orwell’s road to Wigan’. We also ran a panel for the Letchworth festival last year called ‘Poverty then and now: Orwell and his successors’ which you can watch here.
From elsewhere
The diaries
Don’t forget our other Orwell Diary blogs: his Wartime Diary, Hop-Picking Diary and The Road to Wigan Pier Diary. You can sign up to our newsletter If you’ve got any suggestions about our website(s), we’d love to hear from you – email us on katriona.lewis@mediastandardstrust.org. You can also follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook.