George Orwell
Orwell's press card portrait, taken in 1933
Eric Arthur Blair
(25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense, revolutionary opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a belief in democratic socialism.
Considered perhaps the twentieth century’s best chronicler of English culture, Orwell wrote fiction, polemical journalism, literary criticism and poetry. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949) and the satirical novella Animal Farm (1945). They have together sold more copies than any two books by any other twentieth-century author.
His Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, together with his numerous essays on politics, literature, language and culture, are widely acclaimed.
Orwell’s influence on contemporary culture, popular and political, continues.
Several of his neologisms along with the term Orwellian now a byword for any draconian or manipulative social phenomenon or concept inimical to a free society have entered the vernacular.
In “Politics and the English Language”, Orwell provides six rules for writers:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
—George Orwell.
Orwell's former home at 77 Parliament Hill, Hampstead
Orwell The square in Barcelona renamed in Orwell's honour
Orwell Southwold – North Parade
Orwell British Club in Kathar (In Orwell's time it consisted of only the ground floor)
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