George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair, known by the pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic born in British India. He wrote in English during the 1930s and 1940s, and his work remains a reference point for thinking about power, propaganda and surveillance. He matters today because his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are still read as warnings about totalitarianism, and several of his coinages have entered everyday English.

He was born in 1903 in Motihari, in what is now the Indian state of Bihar, into a lower-upper-middle-class family with limited means. His father worked in the colonial opium administration, and his mother, of French descent, brought him to England when he was still a small child. He attended well-regarded schools on scholarships, first St Cyprian's and then Eton, where he later recalled being relatively happy because students enjoyed considerable independence, and where he befriended future writers.

Unable to afford university, he joined the Indian Imperial Police and spent about five years in Burma. There he developed a deep hostility toward British imperialism, which he later drew on in Burmese Days (1934) and in the essay 'Shooting an Elephant'. He returned to England in 1927 and resolved to become a writer. Before publishing, he lived for spells in poverty, worked as a dishwasher in Paris and as a schoolteacher, and helped run a secondhand bookshop in Hampstead. These experiences fed into Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), his first book, which appeared under the pen name he had adopted that year so as not to embarrass his parents.

His concern for working-class life took shape in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a report on poverty in industrial northern England that blends social investigation with personal reflection. That same year he went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He reached Barcelona at the end of 1936 and served as a militiaman on the Huesca front on the Republican side. The experience, which strengthened his opposition to both fascism and Stalinism, is recorded in Homage to Catalonia (1938).

His style is clear, direct and wary of rhetoric. In essays such as 'Politics and the English Language' he argued for plain prose as a defence against political manipulation. His thinking combined democratic socialism with criticism of authoritarian regimes of every kind. In 1945 he published Animal Farm, a fable about a revolution that decays into tyranny, and in 1949, months before his death, Nineteen Eighty-Four, his best-known dystopia.

He died in London in 1950, aged 46. His legacy is wide: the adjective 'Orwellian' is used to describe systems of control and surveillance, and phrases such as 'Big Brother' and 'doublethink' are part of common speech. In 2008 The Times ranked him the second-greatest British writer since 1945.