BIOGRAPHY
George Orwell was born in India and educated at Eton College. He joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, but after five years returned to England to pursue a career as a writer. He spent over a decade and a half intermittently at large in London, from the tramping excursions that produced Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), to his days in a Hampstead bookshop - the background to Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) - and domestic life in locations as varied as St John's Wood and Kilburn. The importance of the capital to his work achieved its culmination in his great masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four, where, among other symbolic tamperings with reality, Nelson's statue in Trafalgar Square is replaced with a monument to Big Brother.
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D.J. Taylor is a British novelist and biographer. His biography, Orwell: The Life, won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 2003 and his most recent novel, The Windsor Faction, was joint winner of the 2014 Sidewise Award for Alternate History. David is also well known as a critic and reviewer. |
