short biography of george orwell

Eric Blair was born in 1903 in Motihari, Bengal, in the then British colony of India, where his father, Richard, worked for the Opium Department of the Civil Service. His mother, Ida, brought him to England at the age of one. He did not see his father again until 1907, when Richard visited England for three months before leaving again until 1912. Eric had an older sister named Marjorie and a younger sister named Avril. With his characteristic humour, he would later describe his family's background as "lower-upper-middle class."


At the age of five, Blair was sent to a small Anglican parish school in Henley, which his sister had attended before him. He never wrote of his recollections of it, but he must have impressed the teachers very favourably for two years later he was recommended to the headmaster of one of the most successful preparatory schools in England at the time: St Cyprian's School, in Eastbourne, Sussex. Young Eric attended St Cyprian's on a scholarship that allowed his parents to pay only half of the usual fees. Many years later, he would recall his time at St Cyprian's with biting resentment in the essay "Such, Such Were the Joys," but he did well enough to earn scholarships to both Wellington and Eton colleges.

After a term at Wellington, Eric moved to Eton, where he was a King's Scholar from 1917 to 1921. Later in life he wrote that he had been "relatively happy" at Eton, which allowed its students considerable independence, but also that he ceased doing serious work after arriving there. Reports of his academic performance at Eton vary: some claim he was a poor student, others deny this. It is clear that he was disliked by some of his teachers, who resented what they perceived as disrespect for their authority. In any event, during his time at the school Eric made lifetime friendships with a number of future British intellectuals.


After finishing his studies at Eton, having no prospect of gaining a university scholarship and his family's means being insufficient to pay his tuition, Eric joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He resigned and returned to England in 1928 having grown to hate imperialism (as shown by his first novel Burmese Days, published in 1934, and by such essays as 'A Hanging', and 'Shooting an Elephant'). He adopted his pen name in 1933, while writing for the New Adelphi. He chose a pen name that stressed his deep, lifelong affection for the English tradition and countryside: George is the patron saint of England (and George V was monarch at the time), while the River Orwell in Suffolk was one of his most beloved English sites.

Orwell lived for several years in poverty, sometimes homeless, sometimes doing itinerant work, as he recalled in the book Down and Out in Paris and London. He eventually found work as a schoolteacher until ill health forced him to give this up to work part-time as an assistant in a secondhand bookshop in Hampstead, an experience later recounted in the short novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying.


Soon after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Orwell volunteered to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalist uprising. As a sympathiser of the Independent Labour Party (of which he became a member in 1938), he joined the militia of its sister party in Spain, the non-Stalinist far-left POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification), in which he fought as an infantryman. In Homage to Catalonia he described his admiration for the apparent absence of a class structure in the revolutionary areas of Spain he visited. He also depicted what he saw as the betrayal of that workers' revolution in Spain by the Spanish Communist Party, abetted by the Soviet Union and its secret police, after its militia attacked the anarchists and the POUM in Barcelona in May 1937. Orwell was shot in the neck (near Huesca) on May 20, 1937, an experience he described in his short essay "Wounded by a Fascist Sniper", as well as in Homage to Catalonia. He and his wife Eileen left Spain after narrowly missing being arrested as "Trotskyites" when the communists moved to suppress the POUM in June 1937.


Orwell began supporting himself by writing book reviews for the New English Weekly until 1940. During World War II he was a member of the Home Guard and in 1941 began work for the BBC Eastern Service, mostly working on programmes to gain Indian and East Asian support for Britain's war efforts. He was well aware that he was shaping propaganda, and wrote that he felt like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot." Despite the good pay, he resigned in 1943 to become literary editor of Tribune, the left-wing weekly then edited by Aneurin Bevan and Jon Kimche. Orwell contributed a regular column entitled 'As I Please.'

In 1944 Orwell finished his anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm, which was published the following year with great critical and popular success. The royalties from Animal Farm provided Orwell with a comfortable income for the first time in his adult life. From 1945 Orwell was the Observer's war correspondent and later contributed regularly to the Manchester Evening News. He was a close friend of the Observer's editor/owner, David Astor and his ideas had a strong influence on Astor's editorial policies. In 1949 his best-known work, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published. He wrote the novel during his stay on the island of Jura, off the coast of Scotland.

Between 1936 and 1945 Orwell was married to Eileen O'Shaughnessy, with whom he adopted a son, Richard Horatio Blair (b. May of 1944). She died in 1945 during an operation. In the autumn of 1949, shortly before his death, he married Sonia Brownell.

In 1949 Orwell was approached by a friend, Celia Kirwan, who had just started working for a Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department, which had been set up by the Labour government to publish pro-democratic and anti-communist propaganda. He gave her a list of 37 writers and artists he considered to be unsuitable as IRD authors because of their pro-communist leanings. The list, not published until 2003, consists mainly of journalists (among them the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin) but also includes the actors Michael Redgrave and Charlie Chaplin. Orwell's motives for handing over the list are unclear, but the most likely explanantion is the simplest: that he was helping out a friend in a cause - anti-Stalinism - that both supported. There is no indication that Orwell ever abandoned the democratic socialism that he consistently promoted in his later writings - or that he believed the writers he named should be suppressed. Orwell's list was also accurate: the people on it had all at one time or another made pro-Soviet or pro-communist public pronouncements.

Orwell died at the age of 46 from tuberculosis which he had probably contracted during the period described in Down and Out in Paris and London. He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of his life. Having requested burial in accordance with the Anglican rite, he was interred in All Saints' Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire with the simple epitaph: Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25th 1903, died January 21st 1950.


During most of his career Orwell was best known for his journalism, both in the British press and in books of reportage such as Homage to Catalonia (describing his experiences during the Spanish Civil War), Down and Out in Paris and London (describing a period of poverty in these cities), and The Road to Wigan Pier (which described the living conditions of poor miners in northern England). According to Newsweek, Orwell "was the finest journalist of his day and the foremost architect of the English essay since Hazlitt."

Contemporary readers are more often introduced to Orwell as a novelist, particularly through his enormously successful titles Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The former is considered an allegory of the corruption of the socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism, and the latter is Orwell's prophetic vision of the results of totalitarianism. Orwell denied that Animal Farm was a reference to Stalinism. Orwell had returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and anti-Communist, but he remained to the end a man of the left and, in his own words, a 'democratic socialist'.

Orwell is also known for his insights about the political implications of the use of language. In the essay "Politics and the English Language", he decries the effects of cliche, bureaucratic euphemism, and academic jargon on literary styles, and ultimately on thought itself. Orwell's concern over the power of language to shape reality is also reflected in his invention of Newspeak, the official language of the imaginary country of Oceania in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak is a variant of English in which vocabulary is strictly limited by government fiat. The goal is to make it increasingly difficult to express ideas that contradict the official line - with the final aim of making it impossible even to conceive such ideas. (cf. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). A number of words and phrases that Orwell coined in Nineteen Eighty-Four have entered the standard vocabularly, such as "memory hole," "Big Brother," "Room 101," "doublethink," "thought police," and "newspeak."

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George Orwell

A short biography of george orwell, george orwell’s writing style, works of george orwell.

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75 Years of 1984 : Why George Orwell’s Classic Remains More Relevant Than Ever

Elif shafak on the relentless real-world spread of orwellian dystopia.

There is Orwell the human being. There is Orwell the novelist. There is Orwell the intellectual, the critic, the journalist, the essayist, the radical. But lately, George Orwell—who was born Eric Arthur Blair and who never fully abandoned his original name—has increasingly come to be regarded as a modern oracle, a gifted soothsayer who predicted with terrifying accuracy how fragile and fallible our political systems were, how close the shadow of authoritarianism. His body of work has become a compass to help us navigate our way in times of democratic recession and backsliding, as is the case worldwide. Among all his books, the one that has left the deepest impact on generations of readers across borders is, no doubt, Nineteen Eighty-Four .

I was an undergrad in Turkey when I first discovered the cautionary novel—a tattered copy coincidentally picked up in a second-hand bookshop. Winston Smith, a rebel who does not resemble the heroes in lore and legend; a lonely, pensive and observant individual in an oppressive regime. Big Brother, always watching, dominating every inch of daily life, like an unblinking celestial gaze. The rewriting of a nation’s past to suit the orders and needs of the government/the State/the Party. Sands of personal memory trying to survive the crashing waves of collective amnesia.

It all shook me to my core. I found myself thinking about the story long after I had finished the last page. Back in those days, I had quietly started writing fiction, keeping it to myself, dreaming of becoming a novelist—a wisp of a wish I could not even dare to say out loud. This also happened to be a time when I was reading extensively about the systemic human rights violations that had happened and were still happening in my motherland.

Forgotten truths. Unearthed stories. Taboo subjects. Historical chronicles deftly erased by official propaganda. The labelling of anyone who dared to question the dominant narrative as a ‘traitor.’ Sufferings and silences hidden under the veneer of ‘normal life.’ The world described by Orwell did not seem to be far off. Nor that surreal. It felt eerily familiar and dangerously close.

In retrospect, I do not think I was alone in this feeling. Across the world there must have been so many of us who experienced a similarly uncanny sense of déjà vu upon reading Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time. That is because for those of us who come from “wounded democracies” or autocracies-in-the-making or downright dictatorships, Oceania was never some far-fetched dystopian land set in an unforeseeable future, but something closer, much more visceral. And frightening too. It was not even a prescient warning about where things might lead if politics went unexpectedly wrong. For us, Nineteen Eighty-Four was already here. It was already happening.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, a polarized view of the world was very popular and persistent. According to this, the earth was broadly divided into “solid lands” versus “liquid lands.” The former—mostly, advanced Western democracies—were generally thought to be sturdy, safe, steady. Their citizens no longer had to worry about basic human rights and freedoms—such as freedom of speech or women’s rights—because all these had already been achieved, the threshold of social and political development crossed long, long ago.

It was in “other places,” in those storm-tossed, unsettled, liquid countries that such concerns had more justification. After all, those nations were not “there yet”—not yet solidified, they were still becoming , still in flux. But since history meant the story of progress, even those countries that were ‘lagging behind’ would, sooner or later, catch up with the West. The Berlin Wall had come down, the Soviet Union was no more. The only political model that was viable and sustainable in the long run was liberal democracy. Back in those days, there was tremendous confidence, one that was shared by many in both media and academia, that democracy was the shared future of humankind.

The World Wide Web emerged against this backdrop, which dovetailed with the excitement surrounding the new digital technologies. What followed was an era of hyper-optimism. Trade and technology would make us all interdependent and interconnected. Thanks to the proliferation of social media platforms—and the growing interaction among nations through the exchange of services, goods and capital—we would all become a global village. A democratic village! From now on, the expansion of democracy would be unstoppable since nothing could stand in the way of the flow of information.

Not even dictators, not even the worst autocrats. Social media networks would spread information far and wide. People would become “informed citizens,” and informed citizens would seek fruitful and constructive solutions. If information travelled freely, openly, how could dictators continue to hide the truth from their own people? The age of authoritarianism was over.

There was such naive trust in social media’s ability to precipitate democratic change and goodness that a young couple in Egypt named their newborn child Facebook, and a family in Israel, a couple of months later, called their third child, Like. By the time those babies were reaching adolescence the world had completely and dramatically changed, the hyper-optimism of the previous decades soured into blatant pessimism.

By 2016, it was becoming obvious to most that democracy was not on the rise as predicted, but just the opposite, weakening. The incendiary rhetoric of isolationism, nativist ultranationalism and authoritarianism was echoed in many corners of the world. Surprisingly, this was happening not only in “liquid lands,” but also in “solid lands.” Suddenly the hackneyed binary assumptions of the earlier decades, which were always problematic, were crumbling. Maybe democracy was far more fragile than we had assumed. Maybe we all needed to worry about human rights or freedom of speech or the future of democratic institutions and norms. Maybe there was no such thing as solid lands versus liquid lands, and we were, in truth, all living through “liquid times.”

Even the steady, safe countries of the West were not immune to the dangers of authoritarianism. And as this realization took full hold, the sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four soared. This rise was especially visible in the USA where the Trump administration brazenly told reporters that there were facts and then there were “alternative facts.” That sounded like something you would encounter in Nineteen Eighty-Four . No wonder then that from cinemas to theaters to Broadway, adaptations of the novel proliferated. Many Americans began to feel what we, in other parts of the world, had felt when we read Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time—that it was not some farfetched dystopia set in a remote place and time. It was already here. It was already happening.

Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in a gloomy mood while he was dealing with sickness, deeply worried both for himself and for the state of the world. In particular, he was concerned that objective truth was withering away. The novel is, among many other things, about loss. The loss of truth. The loss of memory. The loss of love and empathy. This is not coincidental. Uncontrolled exercise of power and cruelty is only possible when truth, memory and love/empathy are fully subjugated. It is only then that a human being can be diminished to a “nobody,” an unperson, and the whole society can be reduced down to mere numbers.

When truth fades out on such a massive scale we are catapulted into a hall of distorting mirrors where everything is upside down. The Ministry of Peace engages in the fabrication of war, distrust and hatred. The Ministry of Plenty generates massive inequalities, causing destitution and starvation. The Ministry of Truth manufactures lies. And the primary task of the Ministry of Love is to carry out systemic torture and abuse. In this new order, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and forced-labor camps are labelled as ‘joycamps.’ Distortion of truth can continue so long as citizens do not notice, do not question, do not react—and hence, the following slogan: Ignorance is Strength.

Nineteen Eighty-Four left a profound impact on countless artists and writers from all backgrounds. Thoughtcrime, memory hole, doublethink, Newspeak… The neologisms that Orwell brilliantly coined have become essential parts of our cultural and literary heritage. In 1974 David Bowie wanted to debut a single titled “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” but it was never fully produced as he could not get permission from Orwell’s wife. Radiohead made a song called “2 + 2 = 5” and Manic Street Preachers released another named “Orwellian.”

In fact, “Orwellian” is the most widely used adjective today that is derived from the name of a writer, poet or thinker—far more than Dickensian, Byronic, Freudian, Kafkaesque or Machiavellian. I sometimes wonder whether it would have made George Orwell uncomfortable or even sad to observe that his name has become a synonym for all the things that he vehemently opposed, or would he understand and accept the pure irony of this?

Ours is the age of mass surveillance, populist authoritarian movements and fragile democracies. Social media platforms have accelerated the erosion of truth and the dissemination of misinformation, slander and hate speech. It was a mistake to regard and romanticize information as a panacea for the world’s problems. For they are completely different things: information, knowledge and wisdom. Every day we are bombarded with thousands of snippets of information, but there is very little knowledge, and no time to slow down to gain knowledge, much less wisdom.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is more relevant than ever before. This remarkable novel stands out not only because of the cautionary tale it tells, but also because it sharply discerns the power of language. Words can heal, words can hurt. They can build or destroy. Since human beings think, remember and process their emotions through words, in order to control both critical thinking and emotional intelligence, language must be policed from above. The official dialect of Oceania is Newspeak. Words that have been eliminated must be instantly forgotten.

A totalitarian super-state hates ambiguities, and therefore it will not allow nuances of thought. The philosopher and Holocaust survivor Theodor Adorno once said, “Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.” In this closed mindset there is no appreciation for diversity or pluralism. No room for uncertainty. Everything must be narrowed down to a rigid binary opposition—us versus them. The definition of ‘them’ might change depending on the whims of the regime but there always has to be an ‘enemy,’ and history must be edited and rewritten to fit the new propaganda. The Party knows that “ Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past .”

As I am writing this introduction, book bans across US public schools have increased by almost 35 per cent between July 2022 and June 2023. From racial inequality to sexuality to LGBTQ rights, any subject that is regarded as “unwanted” or “inappropriate” can be used as grounds for censorship. There might come a day when we will see Nineteen Eighty-Four being removed from library shelves. To make sure that day never arrives, this powerful and significant novel must be read, re-read and shared across the world. This we owe to George Orwell.

__________________________________

From 1984: 75th Anniversary Edition by George Orwell. Introduction Copyright © 2024 by Elif Shafak. Available from The Folio Society .

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7 Facts About George Orwell

His real name is Eric Blair

As a child, Orwell yearned to become a famous author, but he intended to publish as E.A. Blair, not his birth name, Eric Blair (he didn't feel the name Eric was suitable for a writer). However, when his first book came out — Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) — a complete pseudonym was necessary (he felt his family wouldn't appreciate the public knowing their Eton-educated son had worked as a dishwasher and lived as a tramp).

Orwell provided his publisher with a list of potential pseudonyms. In addition to George Orwell, which was his preference, the other choices were: P.S. Burton, Kenneth Miles and H. Lewis Allways.

He was spied on during the Spanish Civil War

Orwell not only wrote about state surveillance, but he also experienced it. Biographer Gordon Bowker found the Soviet Union had an undercover agent spying on Orwell and other leftists while they were fighting in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Secret police in Spain also seized diaries Orwell had made while in the country and probably passed them to the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB).

In addition, his own government kept track of Orwell (a fact he was likely unaware of). This began in 1929 when he volunteered to write for a left-wing publication in France. The police also paid attention when Orwell visited coal miners in 1936 while gathering information for The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). In 1942, a police sergeant reported to MI5 that Orwell had "advanced communist views" and dressed "in a bohemian fashion, both at his office and in his leisure hours." Fortunately, the MI5 case officer actually knew Orwell's work and that "he does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with him.

He had difficulties publishing 'Animal Farm'

Financial and popular success eluded Orwell until Animal Farm , his allegorical look at the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. But despite the book's quality, in 1944 Orwell encountered trouble while trying to get it published. Some didn't seem to understand it: T.S. Eliot , a director of publisher Faber and Faber, noted, "Your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm." Victor Gollancz, who'd published much of Orwell's earlier work, was loath to criticize the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin .

Publisher Jonathan Cape almost took on the book, but the Ministry of Information advised against antagonizing the Soviet Union, an ally in World War II (however, the official who gave this warning was later discovered to be a Soviet spy). With rejections accumulating, Orwell even considered self-publishing before Animal Farm was accepted by Fredric Warburg's small press. The success that followed the book's 1945 release probably had some publishers regretting their earlier refusals.

Ernest Hemingway gave him a gun

During the Spanish Civil War, Stalinists turned on POUM, the left-wing group Orwell fought with. This led to POUM members being arrested, tortured and even killed. Orwell escaped Spain before he was taken into custody — but when he traveled to Paris in 1945 to work as a correspondent, he felt he could still be in danger from Communists who were targeting their enemies.

A gun could offer protection, but as a civilian Orwell couldn't easily acquire one. His solution was to turn to Ernest Hemingway . Orwell visited Hemingway at the Ritz and explained his fears. Hemingway, who admired Orwell's writing, handed over a Colt .32. It's unknown if Orwell ever had to use the weapon.

He was friends with Aldous Huxley

Before Orwell wrote 1984 (1949) and Aldous Huxley penned Brave New World (1932), the two met at Eton, where Huxley taught French. While some students took advantage of and mocked Huxley's poor eyesight, Orwell reportedly stood up for him and enjoyed having Huxley as a teacher.

Orwell and Huxley also read each other's most famous work. Writing in Time and Tide in 1940, Orwell called Brave New World "a good caricature of the hedonistic Utopia" but said "it had no relation to the actual future," which he envisaged as "something more like the Spanish Inquisition." In 1949, Huxley sent Orwell a letter with his take on 1984. Though he admired it, he felt "the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience."

He sent the government a list of people he thought were communist sympathizers

On May 2, 1949, Orwell sent a list of names to a friend at the Foreign Office whose job was to fight Soviet propaganda. The 35 names were people he suspected of being communist sympathizers. Orwell noted in his letter, ''It isn't a bad idea to have the people who are probably unreliable listed." He also wrote, "Even as it stands I imagine that this list is very libelous, or slanderous, or whatever the term is, so will you please see that it is returned to me without fail."

Orwell wanted Britain to survive the threat of totalitarianism, and almost certainly felt he was helping that cause. However, it's still surprising that the man who came up with the concept of Big Brother felt comfortable providing the government with a list of suspect names.

He died from tuberculosis

When Orwell's tuberculosis worsened in the 1940s, a cure existed: the antibiotic streptomycin, which had been on in the market in America since 1946. However, streptomycin wasn't readily available in post-war Great Britain.

Given his connections and success, Orwell was able to obtain the drug in 1948 but experienced a severe allergic reaction to it: hair falling out, disintegrating nails and painful throat ulcerations, among other symptoms. His doctors, new to the drug, didn't know a lower dosage likely could have saved him without the horrible side effects; instead, Orwell ceased treatment (the remainder was given to two other TB patients, who recovered). He tried streptomycin once more in 1949 but still couldn't tolerate it. Orwell succumbed to TB on January 21, 1950.

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