George Orwell

George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950), was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic, and one of the defining political writers of the twentieth century. His fables Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) gave the world its most enduring images of totalitarianism — from "Big Brother" and Newspeak to the brutal logic of political propaganda — and remain among the most read and most quoted books ever published.

Orwell's writing grew from a life of intense engagement: colonial policing in Burma, poverty in London and Paris, and fighting on the anti-fascist side in the Spanish Civil War, an experience recorded in Homage to Catalonia. His plain, powerful essays, among them "Politics and the English Language" and "Shooting an Elephant," mark a turning point in modern English prose. He died young of tuberculosis, leaving a small but towering body of work that still shapes how we understand power, language and truth.